Part of this mystical tradition is the existence of “siblys” – people who become human search engines/encyclopaedias thanks to the sharing of blood.īoth Moon and Sparks have wanted to become sibyls since they were children and they have travelled to another island in order to begin the tests and rituals that will allow this. Unlike the technology-obsessed Winters, the Summers are a more primitive and superstitious people who live from fishing, consider mers to be sacred and worship a sea-goddess called The Lady. Several years later, on an island in the Summer areas of the planet, a young woman called Moon leaves home with her beloved cousin Sparks.

She orders the doctor to insert an illegal clone implant into the unconscious woman. The planet’s ruthless Winter queen, Arienrhod, sneaks into the room with a reluctant off-world doctor she has bribed into helping her. During the celebrations, a drunken couple fall asleep in a room in the city’s palace. In the planet’s capital city of Carbuncle, a festival is in full swing to celebrate a visit by the Hegemony’s Prime Minister. When it is open, the Winters are in charge and off-world technology is temporarily available to the planet in exchange for the “water of life” – an immortality serum derived from the blood of sea-creatures called mers.

The planet is split into two tribes – Summers and Winters – who rule depending on whether the wormhole is open or shut. Although Tiamat is a member of a powerful interplanetary alliance called the Hegemony, it is only accesible to the rest of the Hegemony via a wormhole that opens and closes in 150 year cycles.

This is the 1988 Orbit (UK) paperback edition of “The Snow Queen” that I read.

The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge