Scifi book query: setting is planet with long elliptical orbit.
May 14, 2011 5:01 AM   Subscribe

SciFi Filter: What's this book -- came out in the last 10 years, and the basic premise is that it's set on a planet with a long elliptical orbit so that there's a very long winter and a very short summer/growing season. And, it's not The Left Hand of Darkness, which has a similar premise.
posted by beagle to Media & Arts (10 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Could it be Joan D. Vinge's trilogy about Tiamat: The Snow Queen, Winter's End and Summer Queen?
posted by likeso at 5:32 AM on May 14, 2011


(oops, sorry, older than last 10 years)
posted by likeso at 5:33 AM on May 14, 2011


Helliconia series?
posted by ian1977 at 5:48 AM on May 14, 2011


Turns out there's a fourth in the series, Tangled Up In Blue (pub. 2000). And The Summer Queen was published in 1991/2, so that is still within the last 10 years. Vinge entry on wiki.

But I think it's all moot anyway: both the winter and the summer last a loooong time.
posted by likeso at 6:04 AM on May 14, 2011


Was it this story?
posted by empath at 7:15 AM on May 14, 2011


Hello Summer, Goodbye?
posted by empath at 7:19 AM on May 14, 2011


was it Fred Pohl's Stopping at Slowyear?
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:05 AM on May 14, 2011


Response by poster: Thanks all, I was asking for my wife, who had not actually read this but had it recommended to her by her brother, who has since died. So, we'll dig into these. The Vinge series sounds likeliest.
posted by beagle at 10:30 AM on May 14, 2011


Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (1999, the quasi-prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep) features aliens whose planet has a complex orbit, with the effect that the planet is frozen and uninhabitable for hundreds of years at a time and the aliens have to hibernate between thaws.
posted by neckro23 at 10:49 AM on May 14, 2011


(Apparently my memory isn't so great -- the planet is frozen because its star mysteriously turns itself off for a couple hundred years at a time, not due to its orbit.)
posted by neckro23 at 10:52 AM on May 14, 2011


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