30 November, 2002
Tangled Up in Blue
Joan D. Vinge
2000
293 pp, MMPB
The problem with this book is that it isn't sure what it wants to be. In less than 300 pages, it tries to be both a prequel to The Snow Queen (which, incidentally, is an excellent book) and a semi-standalone cop drama. It takes place on the backwater world of Tiamat, several years before The Snow Queen. Several factions of a secret society have come to Tiamat in pursuit of an ancient artifact which supposedly holds the key to a wealth of lost technology, and they are willing to go to any length to obtain the artifact.
Caught in the center of the conflict are two ordinary cops. They're two of only three survivors of a massacre (which is also tied to the search for the artifact) in which over a dozen police were slaughtered. One of these men is patrolman Nyx LaisTree, whose brother was killed in the massacre, and who might be the only witness of who did it, if only he hadn't lost his memory of the event. The other is BZ Gundhalinu, a smart-but-wimpy sargeant, who owes his rank to class privilege, rather than merit. He and his partner accidentally walked into the end of the massacre when they went to investigate a downed security system in a warehouse. (Gundhalinu's partner is the thrid survivor, but she's incapacitated by injury for most of the book, and doesn't play a major role.) In the grand tradition of cop dramas, Gunhalinu and LaisTree don't trust or respect each other, but they end up having to cooperate in order to uncover the truth about what really happened in the warehouse, and who was responsible for the bloody deaths of all those police officers.
If Vinge had managed to focus on that basic plot, Tangled Up in Blue would have been a straightforward, if not particularly original, police novel IN SPAAAAACE, and all would have been well. However, the novel is also a prequel. As such, it depends too much on the reader having knowledge of the setting and some of the characters. Various aspects of the plot and setting aren't explained as well as they should have been, because they turn up in the earlier novel. Likewise, various important characters are developed rather vaguely. If this were really a stand-alone police novel, those characters would not have been so prominent; they'd have stayed in the background. I think this book would have been a lot more satisfying if the author had taken that approach, and focussed on the three main characters (the two cops, plus a love interest).
That being said, nothing about the book struck me as being particularly bad; it's just that nothing about it is especially noteworthy, either. I don't know how it would strike somebody who hasn't read The Snow Queen, but my recommendation to such a person would be to read The Snow Queen instead.