A review by ianbanks
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

5.0

This is dated in a way that most books around forty years old are dated but the setting and ideas are presented competently enough that it doesn’t really matter. It’s about a healer, Snake, who travels with three gengineered snakes that help her practice medicine. One of them is killed and she must find a replacement for it. It sounds like a standard quest story and in a lot of ways it is, but what makes it stand out is the easy prose that lulls the reader into thinking they are getting something conventional until they realise that they aren’t. It’s unusual in that it presents a post-apocalyptic society that has achieved a measure of gender parity that was unheard of even in the time it was written. Snake travels through a landscape that threatens her, not as a woman, but as a human being. She is respected and listened to for her achievements and earned status rather than for an accident of birth. But none of this is presented as a major point in the novel: it is an incidental detail in a world in which sexuality is treated as matter-of-factly as any other aspect of life. And in a novel that has so much else going for it - great writing, interesting characters, a world that feels real, a plot that builds up a steady head of steam - some plain old progressiveness feels like the icing on a delicious cake.