Dreamsnake

This is soft sci-fi that reads as almost fantasy. I seem to really love that combination. The premise is unusual and interesting. A healer woman whose main healing technology is the use of venomous snakes whose bodies make her medicines after she gives them chemicals to induce their production. An oddly medieval world with occasional spurts of high technology, like solar panels and bio-engineering. An alien species of snake whose venom causes people to dream which healers use to allow the dying to die in peace. Radioactive craters, domes full of alien life, and an enclosed high-tech city that lets no one in. I am in love with the world and I really like the characters. I'm not so pleased with my romp in that world being over. I would show more really have liked it if the author had written more than they did because there was quite a bit of story yet to be had in that world with those characters. I see that there is another book set in this universe about a different person, so I will read that as soon as I can get it, but I would have liked to see the next step in Snake's journey. show less

One of those SF books I've been long aware of but have never got around to, Dreamsnake is the tale of a woman called Snake, a healer who travels a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape offering her services where they are needed, partly via means of genetically engineered serpents which can synthesise cures to ailments and then inject them by biting the patients. When the rarest of her three snakes is killed she sets out to redeem herself for what she sees as an irreplaceable loss that she has caused.

The world is well rendered, the apocalypse there as a fact, some indefinable time in the (distant?) past, complete with areas of deadly radiation and strange (alien?) plants and humanity scattered into tribes with their own traditions and show more cultures that warily trade with each other via wandering caravans. It feels small, this world, with travel only possible on foot or horseback and, while there is a definite sense of danger, most of the world seems to have settled into a relatively safe equilibrium. One where the young woman snake feels that she can travel alone in safety, protected only by the regard people have for her profession. While we do realise that Snake is somewhat naive, this is certainly not [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg|3355573], or even [b:A Canticle for Leibowitz|164154|A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)|Walter M. Miller Jr.|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329408540s/164154.jpg|250975]. The people we see generally cope well, in small communities, with their agrarian or small-town lives. I'm sure this could be criticised as overly optimistic, although we have no idea how long humanity has had to settle into this after the devastation, and we do see an example later on of those who have coped less well.

What McIntyre does very well is her characters, which are drawn vividly with economy and grace (a good description of her writing overall, in fact, which is sometimes quite beautiful) and the lack of explication - she mentions several times 'forever trees', only stating toward the end when the characters are looking for firewood that there were marks where someone had foolishly tried to hack into their iron-hard trunks; the way that people are trained to control their fertility; the apocalypse itself - all mentioned in the manner of things that people know and take for granted.

Just as I was starting this book I happened to hear an interview with [a:William Gibson|9226|William Gibson|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1373826214p2/9226.jpg] (on the Inquiring Minds podcast) where he mentioned that when he tried to get back into reading SF he found much of it disappointing, with the exception of the branch of feminist SF in the 1970s - [a:Octavia Butler|8302480|Octavia Butler|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1407500795p2/8302480.jpg], [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg], [a:Joanna Russ|52310|Joanna Russ|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1218217927p2/52310.jpg] - and I think that I would place Dreamsnake in there, although perhaps it stands out as less obviously so than some other works. show less

The cover above is the edition of "Dreamsnake" that snagged my attention back in 1980. The graphics were original and intriguing. Winning the Hugo AND the Nebula awards placed it alongside "Dune ", "The Left Hand of Darkness", "Ringworld " and "The Dispossessed " all by authors I knew well. Yet I had never heard of Vonda McIntyre.

I bought the book, was hooked from the first scene, read it compulsively for the next few days and have carried it with me from house to house ever since.



When I came across the audiobook version (with a much less inspired cover), I decided to find out whether the book was impressive because it was of its time or whether it was simply a good book.

The audiobook itself must have been pioneering as it was recorded show more by Blackstone Audio in 1999. You can hear its age from time to time in the sound quality but Anna Fields' talent as a narrator more than makes up for that.

I'm happy to say that "Dreamsnake" is just as good now as I remember it being then.

Even on the first read, I was aware of how deftly Vonda McIntyre tells her tale. She builds a complete view of a complex world, not by using info-dumps/quotes from historical chronicles, but by showing what people take for granted and what they question.

Back then I was also impressed by the liberal sexual mores of societies that embraced, polyamory and required adults to have control over their own reproductive capabilities. These were radical ideas back then but "Dreamsnake" neither sensationalises them nor pushes them as dogma.

On a second read, I became aware that Vonda McIntyre had done something truly remarkable that I didn't notice the first time around: she has written an exciting adventure that calls for bravery and self-sacrifice in the face of physical danger but where problems are never resolved through violence.

The strongest themes in this book are freedom, responsibility, and mutual obligation. Yet the book also reads as a quest-based adventure.

"Snake", the Healer in the book, remains one of my favourite characters in Science Fiction. She is honest, brave, determined to help others but not superhuman. She is prone to anger, guilty of arrogance from time to time and often endangers herself and others because of a fundamentally naive world-view. Yet she is the kind of person who will always inspire fierce loyalty without ever seeking to do so.

"Dreamsnake" is a short book by modern SF standards. On the re-read, I was aware of how much more I wanted to know about this world and the people in it. There is enough here to power at least a trilogy. "Dreamsnake" was actually built on a short story "Of Mist and Grass and Sand" which perhaps explains its compact power and there were no sequels.

If you are an SF fan, you should count "Dreamsnake" as part of the cannon.

If you're not sure if SF is for you, give "Dreamsnake" a try and see if Snake and her serpents can win your heart the way they did mine. show less

I picked up this novel as part of my goal to read 10 Nebula award winning novels in 2024. Reading it in this vintage Pan paperback edition was an extra treat.

The story takes us to a world that has been devastated by nuclear warfare. Scattered tribes live in deserts and mountains. There is only one city ("Center") of note. Healthcare is almost non-existent except for the healers. The healers devote themselves to travel, giving out vaccinations and treating people. Genetically engineered snakes significantly augment the healer's medical skills. There's just one problem - the dreamsnake - is in short supply. The dreamsnakes comes from "off-world," and there are not enough available for the healers to use.

The long journeys of the novel - show more on foot and by horses -reminded of fantasy novels in a good way. The very different tribes and receptions faced by Snake, the protagonist healer of the tale, are revealing. The novel is strongly character driven and we see our characters struggle with physical and emotional pain. It was also refreshing to see an award-winning SF novel by a woman featuring female characters who have their different strengths and weaknesses.

Reading this 1970s novel in the 2020s, I can't help but see the dreamsnakes as a metaphor for the opiod crisis. Dreamsnakes (like powerful pain medication) can be used to alleviate suffering when used with care. Yet, both can also become crippling addictions that destroy lives.

My one critique was the very light touch world building. Very little of the backstory is ever revealed. How long ago was the nuclear war? What is the story of these "offworlders" who introduced dreamsnakes? How do the healers have genetic engineering/manipulation technology but nearly nothing else advanced? show less

One of the blurbs on the back from Frank Herbert describes this book as "readable", and it is just about that, in the sense that Keystone Light is "drinkable" or Taco Bell "edible." Treacly characters, flopsy world-building, and shoddy writing combine for a book that is just embarrassing. What do I mean?

In a post-apocalyptic Earth, ravaged by nuclear war and contact with aliens, Snake is a Healer who used advanced biotechnology in the form of altered snake venom to cure disease. The dreamsnake is a strange alien creature, with a mind-altering bite that brings painless death to those who cannot be cured. Crude and superstitious herders kill Snake's precious dreamsnake, and so she wanders around the wasteland helping out people and trying show more to find another dreamsnake. Snake is really just the best. She cares about everybody: Snake does what she can for an prospector with a broken back, teaches a nervous young man about love, saves a dying lord, rescues a child from a sexually abusive guardian, fulfills a dying wish, helps an addict, and breaks up a cult that is abusing the powers of the dreamsnake, before finding Tru Wuv. She rides a fancy racehorse when she's not riding the tiger-striped pony she genetically engineered. But Snake's not perfect: she just cares so much it makes her tired and lonely; but she'd never abuse her healing powers in the wasteland for personal benefit; and sometimes she hurts from arthritis brought on by her snake-venom-juiced immune system.

The wasteland is the nicest post-apocalypse I've seen, with honest tribes of nomads, peaceful and prosperous cities, and the right craftsman when you need one. The only hints of conflict or desperation come from Central City, the sole humans who trade with aliens who are divided into paranoid clans. Of course, Snake doesn't actually go into Central City, or interact with them beyond the gatekeeper, because conflict isn't interesting or something. By the way, accidental pregnancy (and related drama) is avoided through "biocontrol" techniques that are explained in detail during awkward sex scenes. The atomic apocalypse, the aliens, the hints of more advanced technologies and hidden schools of esoteric knowledge, seem to be cargo culted from the genre at large rather than included for any actual reason. The seemingly benevolent Healers, like Snake, limit their numbers to the scarce dreamsnakes, rather than using their "mundane" techniques like tumor-melting vipers and vaccine-producing rattlesnakes, to serve as many people as possible. Some humanitarians!

As for the writing, it is overall juvenile, and in places cringe-worthy. And even though the language is simple, it's unclear in critical descriptions of action and physicality. I found myself flipping back a page to check where people were relative to each other, and who had been shot with a crossbow, multiple times. A few nice descriptions of deserts can't save this. The idea of the dreamsnake is woefully underused. We're told Snake needs one to be a healer, but she gets on perfectly well saving lives without one for the entire novel. Compared to other Hugo stinkers, Fritz Lieber at least writes with energy, and the ponderous psuedo-intellectualism of "yeast vat accident Mark Clifton’s They’d Rather Be Right" (props to Scott Lynch) fit the scope of the topics. Dreamsnake can't even live up to it's meager ambitions.

On an interesting historical note, 4 of the 5 Hugo nominees this year were women, with Vonda McIntyre, Ann McCaffrey, C.J. Cherryh, and a withdrawn entry from James Tiptree Jr. Both McCaffrey and Cherryh submitted the third book in a trilogy, which may have hurt their chances in the voting. Neither are my favorite authors, but they have to be better than this book. show less

I first read the novella "Of Mist, And Grass, And Sand," on which Chapter 1 of this book is based, many years ago and enjoyed it, but have only just got round to reading the novel. So I was quite surprised to realise, once you get past that section, that the book is actually post-apocalyptic science fiction, although the opening could have belonged to a fantasy.

The lead character, Snake, is a healer on her one year probation following the completion of her training. She has gone off to the desert, where healers seldom go, to help the tribesfolk there, and been asked to heal a young boy dying of a tumour. Like all healers, she carries three snakes: a rattler, called Sand - which we later learn has been bioengineered to produce various show more vaccines in its venom that can be harvested and then used to immunise people, a white cobra called Mist, which can destroy tumours with its venom, and a dreamsnake, which can give hallucinogenic dreams to ease the passing of anyone the healer cannot help.

In the opening chapter, Snake underestimates the tribesfolk's fear of snakes, and her dreamsnake is killed. This is a disaster as she cannot now help the dying and feels she must return home to the healers. The dreamsnakes are rare, do not breed well and cannot be cloned - as we learn later in the book, the healers are able to perform genetic engineering, although they lack the kind of equipment which would let them examine the dreamsnakes more closely and perhaps solve the problem. For the dreamsnakes are not earth animals.

Over the course of the novel, Snake travels from one place to another, meeting different communities which each have their own ways of life, morals, and so on. One place is Center, an odd sealed-off community which preserves more advanced technology predating the nuclear war which evidently took place centuries before, and whose inhabitants are in contact with offworlders. There are people on other planets, as is mentioned from time to time, and some might be colonists from Earth, but there are also definitely aliens, as the dreamsnakes and certain flora and fauna Snake later discovers are all alien.

Her original intent to go home and tell the healers what happened to her dreamsnake is waylaid, first by a request to help someone who has had a serious accident, and then by the fulfilment of a promise to travel to Center and request that they help either with technology or new dreamsnakes. On the way, she stays a while at a town in the mountains where, despite things being fine on the surface, child abuse of various kinds is transpiring.

The story is slow and meandering and switches between two viewpoints, since Arevin, a man who is introduced in chapter 1, eventually travels to the healer community and subsequently goes in search of Snake. He and Snake had an instant attraction, but at the time he didn't feel he could abandon his responsibilities. There is good character development and scene setting throughout, though some of the situations are a bit odd. Presumably, the healer community is a utopia of sorts, because issues such as sexual abuse and drug addiction seem to take Snake totally by surprise as if she has never encountered them before. Since this is the first time she has left home, we must assume neither problem is known in her own community, though you would have expected the older healers to have warned her. She therefore tends to blunder into situations and be beset continually by problems, some of which are of her own making.

The post-apocalyptic background isn't entirely convincing, partly because it is never made clear how the aliens fit in. They have left domes behind which are too tough to get inside - except one in the final sequence which is 'broken', apparently by a superweapon - in which alien flora and perhaps fauna reside. It isn't clear what the community she comes upon at the end actually subsist on, or what their dreamsnakes eat for that matter. The story almost begs a sequel in which the healers go there with an armed escort to gather a lot more snakes for a proper gene pool than the few Snake manages to escape with.

Given the alien origin and rarity of the dreamsnakes, it isn't clear why they became so crucial to the healers, and why the notion of genetically engineering snakes to produce the various vaccines etc arose in the first place. And the geography is hard to envisage - certainly where the desert at the start is in relation to the healer community in the mountains, and where Center and the mountain town she stays at, and the later location in the mountains all fit in.

I like some aspects of the story, such as the mutual respect between sexual partners (with the exception of the abuser, of course) though the fact that people are taught to bio-control their fertility is a bit farfetched. The secondary protagonist, Arevin, is not allowed to detract from Snake's autonomy - she single-handedly deals with the punishing situation at the end of the book, and I liked the relationship between her and her adopted daughter. However, I found the whole "point" of Center confusing - I realise that the person she dealt with there freaked out when he saw her companion's burns, thinking they were genetic damage of some kind, but even before that, he had started ranting at Snake in a deranged and nonsensical manner as soon as she mentioned that the healers wanted to clone the snakes, as if cloning was a huge offence. There seems to be a massive backstory which is never disclosed and I found that a bit frustrating. I've since learned that another novel of McIntyre's, The Exile Waiting, is set in the same future so maybe some answers will be provided there, but have to judge the current novel on its own merits as it is not the first part of a trilogy, for example, and should stand on its own. So for me the book balances out at 3 stars only. show less

This gets three stars because it is an intricately constructed world with fascinating elements. However, I wanted to give it two because I just did not enjoy reading this. I can't tell if that's because it is too much of its time (I am a huge fan of 70s feminist sf but this felt so very 70s... too 70s even) or because it read too much like fantasy in a way that I didn't like. Either way, this was not for me.