Joan Vinge acknowledges the strong influence on
her work of Andre NORTON’s early science fiction
adventures, but she also draws heavily on fairy
tales, transforming them into settings and situations on distant worlds and in unfamiliar cultures.
She made her initial entry into the field with a series of distinguished stories during the late 1970s,
winning the Hugo Award for “Eyes of Amber”
(1977). That title is one of several stories by Vinge
that deal with communications between humans
and aliens, this one accomplished remotely by
means of a probe whose descent onto a primitive
world causes a shift in a power struggle among the
local nobility and a change of perspective on the
part of the female alien most closely associated
with it. “Fireship” (1978) is an even more complex
tale in which the interaction is between two altered human personalities, one a cyborg, the other
a virtual personality who has been literally transferred into computer memory. “The Crystal Ship”
(1976) and “Phoenix in the Ashes” (1978) were
also impressive efforts, particularly for such a new
writer.
The Outcasts of Heaven’s Belt (1978), Vinge’s
first novel, supported the belief that she was a
major new writer, one who could successfully blend
the core of myth with a hard science fiction setting. In this case, the story is about the struggle
over control of a spaceship by two separate cultures within the asteroid belt, one dominated by
males and the other by females, who have only recently approached an uneasy peace following the
civil war that separated them. Eventually the two
sides are forced to cooperate. A novella, “Legacy”
(1980), set against the same backdrop, reprises the
same core plot with different parameters and on a
smaller scale. Two out-of-work residents of the asteroid belt are compelled by circumstances to pool
their resources and jointly establish a salvage company. Unfortunately, most of Vinge’s fiction during
the 1980s consisted of media tie-in novels, and
fewer than a half-dozen new short stories have
appeared in the past two decades.
Vinge has continued to write novels sporadically, the most successful of which was The Snow
Queen (1980), set on Tiamat, a planet that experiences a vastly extended annual climatic cycle. The
local ruler is slated to surrender her throne with
the end of the season, but she is secretly plotting to
use advanced offworld cloning technology and perpetuate her reign. The ensuing conflict between
the ruler and a younger, cloned version of herself is
dramatically a struggle between good and evil, although Vinge’s characters are too well drawn to fit
comfortably into either category. The novel won
the Hugo Award and was followed by three sequels, although only one extends the original story
line. In the first, World’s End (1984), a man who
loved the queen of Tiamat pursues a new life as a
police official on another world, eventually resolving his internal doubts during a lengthy and dangerous trek into the less settled regions of his new
home.
The Summer Queen (1991) returned to the
main story line, and is one of the longest and most
complex stories the genre has yet seen. The new
queen is determined to nudge her people into
adopting a more forward-looking attitude toward
the rest of the universe, but her plans are complicated by a number of issues, and when contact
with the outside universe is restored, the planet
faces a fresh round of crises. One of the life-forms
on Tiamat has a substance in its blood that can extend human lives dramatically, and there is concern that the species will be hunted to extinction.
The discovery of a practical faster-than-light drive
means that Tiamat will no longer be insulated from
the outside for extended periods of time and the
machinations of an electronically recorded personality and a secretive cult dominated by a remarkably evil man add multiple layers of plots and
counterplots. The fourth novel set in this universe
is Tangled Up in Blue (2000), in which two police
officials and a prostitute attempt to expose corruption within a planetary government. Although it
lacks the scale of The Summer Queen, it is in some
ways a more consistently satisfying story.
Vinge’s other series includes Psion (1982),
Catspaw (1988), and Dreamfall (1996), stories
more obviously influenced by Andre Norton. Cat
is a rarity, a telepath, and various powers wish to
use him as a weapon in an interplanetary war. Although he successfully preserves his freedom in the
first volume, private interests and other enemies
menace him in the two sequels.
Vinge’s small body of short stories is of high
quality and has been collected in Fireship (1978),
The Eyes of Amber (1979), and Phoenix in the Ashes
(1985). Although she does not produce work with
the frequency usually required to retain a strong
reputation, her novels have been of such a consistently high quality that her fans have been content
to live with the long gaps between them.