A review by nwhyte
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/dream.htm[return][return]The first chapter, originally published as "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" won a 1973 Nebula in its own right for Best Novelette. That must make it the only text to have won either Hugo or Nebula twice, once on first publication and again on inclusion in the longer work.[return][return]Dreamsnake is the story of a healer called Snake, who heals people with the serum of genetically modified snakes. In the first chapter she loses her dreamsnake, a rare and almost irreplaceable creature. The rest of the book has her wandering through desert settings and towns to try and find a replacement, adopting Melissa, a girl who has suffered mutilation and sexual abuse, being ejected by the hi-tech city called Centre, and finally discovering the secret of the dreamsnakes while evading enslavement by a bad guy. She is rescued at the end by a bloke called Arevin who she met in the first chapter.[return][return]The setting of Dreamsnake is quite remarkable. Most readers pick up on the fact that it is a depopulated Earth many years after an almost forgotten nuclear holocaust. However, much more important is that the big issues of human sexuality have been almost completely sorted out (see Janice Dawley's comments on the feministsf mailing list). Both men and women can control their own fertility by "biocontrol"; polyamorous relationships are accepted as everyday; women are leaders of desert tribes (though men seem to be in control in the few towns). The gender of one character is left completely unspecified, leading some readers to conclude that he/she must be a hermaphrodite. I don't think this is the case, since such individuals are not mentioned elsewhere in the novel (compare the direct way in which Ursula Le Guin and Lois McMaster Bujold present this issue); instead I agree with Le Guin that the author is challenging the reader to ask why we need to know Merideth's gender in the first place.[return][return]This could have been a utopian setting, in which the author preached the superiority of a world where women are not oppressed. However it is not. Snake has to deal with superstition, radiation poisoning, crime, child abuse, drug abuse, abuse of power and above all disease as she travels across the blasted heaths of her world. The bad guys do tend to be men but so are some of the good guys. The most utopian aspect is the low-tech environment, compensated for by the advanced biological techniques of the healers who are in harmony with nature.[return][return]This novel has one great character and many great ideas - Ethan Merritt, in response to an uncharacteristically negative review by Steve Parker, called Dreamsnake "one of the best works of biological SF ever written", and he may well be right. My biggest disappointment (shared by James Schellenberg) is that the plot is rather disjointed; you can see the seams. The expedition of Snake and Melissa to the walled city of Centre which appears to be the main thrust of the middle of the book turns out to be a fools' errand. The actual venue for the book's climax has not been signalled at all in advance, so it feels rather as if the author was making it up as she went along. The only bit of the end that has been prefigured is the reappearance of Arevin, who literally rides in to save the day in the last few pages, fatally undermining the feminist themes of the book as he does so. Compare Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan, also about a female healer in a less primitive, more violent environment, which is a much more tightly plotted novel. (Actually I think the two make a good paired reading.)