Most probably the tear motif is folkloric. Either it's somewhere out there or it comes to mind archetypically as a trope for greed.
(Tiptree did have a story with that plot before she made a novel out of the idea, but it's not a specially well-known story and so if Snodgrass got the idea from a sff, probably it was indeed "The Snow Queen." It's not necessarily so, though.)
It can work the other way around, though, with the time-travel. Adolescents are very exacting readers as soon as they have any choice of the stuff they grok. I spent many happy hours grading the merits of the different Trek novels. My favorites were Vonda McIntyre's. I had a little sight-unseen crush on her in those days.
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Date: 2009-05-19 03:26 am (UTC)(Tiptree did have a story with that plot before she made a novel out of the idea, but it's not a specially well-known story and so if Snodgrass got the idea from a sff, probably it was indeed "The Snow Queen." It's not necessarily so, though.)
It can work the other way around, though, with the time-travel. Adolescents are very exacting readers as soon as they have any choice of the stuff they grok. I spent many happy hours grading the merits of the different Trek novels. My favorites were Vonda McIntyre's. I had a little sight-unseen crush on her in those days.