Dreamsnake

In the devastated world of Dreamsnake, advanced civilisation has collapsed, much of the Earth is barren or radioactive, and medical care is delivered by travelling healers carrying genetically altered snakes. This may sound like the result of an unusually severe inspection failure, but Snake knows exactly what she is doing.

Snake—both her name and her profession’s principal equipment list—is a healer who travels between isolated communities with three serpents. Mist, a cobra, and Sand, a rattlesnake, produce venoms that can be used to cure disease. Grass, the rare alien dreamsnake, brings peaceful dreams to the dying. It is a remarkably elegant medical system, provided patients can overcome the suspicion that treatment ought not to hiss at them.

When Grass is killed by frightened villagers, Snake loses something far more important than a companion. Dreamsnakes are exceptionally scarce, and without one she may no longer be accepted as a healer. She therefore sets out to find a replacement, crossing a harsh landscape populated by nomads, outcasts, damaged communities and people whose response to unfamiliar medicine frequently demonstrates why informed consent requires more than a startled glance.

Her journey becomes a quest not only for another dreamsnake but for a way to preserve her identity and purpose. Along the way, Snake treats the sick, confronts cruelty and encounters lives constrained by fear, custom and power. She is capable and self-reliant without being transformed into an invulnerable action figure; her strength lies principally in knowledge, persistence and compassion, qualities that seldom receive sufficiently dramatic promotional artwork.

Vonda N. McIntyre’s future Earth is both primitive and technologically haunted. Humanity has lost much of its former knowledge, yet biological engineering survives in the bodies of the healers’ snakes. Elsewhere, an advanced city remains sealed away from the surrounding world, maintaining the traditional civilised policy of possessing valuable resources and refusing to share them with anyone inadequately credentialled.

Originally published in 1978, Dreamsnake grew from McIntyre’s award-winning story “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.” The resulting novel won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, an impressive accumulation for a comparatively compact book about a woman travelling through a wasteland with a box of venomous reptiles. It blends post-apocalyptic science fiction, feminist speculation and the structure of a mythic quest while remaining intimate, humane and pleasingly strange.

This 1979 Pan Books edition is in Very Good condition. It has survived the decades without irradiation, serious venom damage or attack by frightened villagers, and remains an attractive copy of one of the most distinctive science-fiction novels of its period.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where all snakes have been removed before dispatch and no medical claims are made for the contents, however restful the reader’s dreams may become.

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