Dreamsnake
by Vonda N. McIntyre
Summary
Snake is a healer on an Earth left broken by nuclear war, and she travels the desert with three serpents in a case. Grass, Mist and Sand are her instruments. She uses their venom, altered by techniques her order has preserved, to cure disease, to vaccinate, and to ease the dying out of pain.
The novel opens with a family who are frightened of the snakes, and who kill Grass while she is treating their child. Grass was a dreamsnake, an alien species brought to Earth long ago by visitors nobody now remembers, and dreamsnakes cannot easily be bred. Losing one is close to losing the profession. The rest of the book is Snake travelling to find a replacement and refusing to accept that there is not one.
It is a quiet book about competence, which is a rarer subject than it should be. Snake is good at her job, she takes her responsibilities seriously, and the tension comes from obstacles rather than from villains. McIntyre also writes sexuality and consent with a directness that was unusual in 1978 and still reads as thoughtful rather than dated.
Expect an episodic shape, since this grew out of a shorter piece and keeps that rhythm, and expect the ruined world to stay in the background rather than being explained to you. Expect warmth above all. It is a post apocalyptic novel with no interest in cruelty as entertainment and no appetite for punishing its heroine, and it holds up a great deal better than most of its decade.
Historical Context & Significance
Dreamsnake won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1978 and the Hugo and Locus awards the following year, an unusually complete sweep for a book that is not obviously prize shaped.
It grew from Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand, a 1973 novelette that had already won McIntyre her first Nebula in 1973, so the award record traces one idea being developed over five years.
McIntyre was a founder of the Clarion West writers workshop and spent much of her career supporting other writers, and she wrote a long run of Star Trek novels that introduced elements later absorbed into the films. Dreamsnake went out of print for years despite its awards, an omission she eventually addressed by issuing it herself as an ebook. She died in 2019, and the novel has since been reissued and rediscovered.