SOURCE: "From Alienation to Personal Triumph: The Science Fiction of Joan D. Vinge," in The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It, edited by Tom Staicar, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982, pp. 103-30.

In the following excerpt, Yoke examines the theme of alienation in Vinge's stories.

But she wore the nomad's tunic she had brought back with her from Persiponë's, the only clothing she owned, its gaudy color as alien as she suddenly felt herself, among the people who should have been her own.

These lines from the "footrace" scene in Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen clearly express the psychological alienation of Dawn Moontreader Summer, the novel's heroine. Though she stands in a crowd of people from her own clan, she feels that she is an outsider, that she is somehow divorced from the very culture in which she was raised. This is the fundamental...