Dreamsnake

Dreamsnake is a 1978 science fiction novel by American writer Vonda N. McIntyre. It was well-received, winning the 1979 Hugo Award,[1] the 1978 Nebula Award,[2] and the 1979 Locus Award.[1] The novel follows a healer on her quest to replace her "dreamsnake", a small snake whose venom is capable of inducing dreams. According to the author, the world is Earth, but in the post-apocalyptic future and thus scientifically and socially much different from the present.[3] The novel is based upon McIntyre's 1973 novelette "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand", for which she won her first Nebula Award.[4][5]

Dreamsnake
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
AuthorVonda N. McIntyre
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
PublisherHoughton Mifflin
Publication date
1978
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages277
Awards
ISBN0-395-26470-7
OCLC3558965
813/.5/4
LC ClassPZ4.M1526 Dr PS3563.A3125

Background and setting

In 1971, McIntyre, then living in Seattle, set up the Clarion West writers' workshop, which she then helped run through 1973. One of the workshop's instructors was Ursula K. Le Guin.[6] During a 1972 workshop session, one of the writing assignments was to create a story from two randomly chosen words, one pastoral, and one related to technology. McIntyre's effort would become her 1973 short story "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand". That story grew into Dreamsnake, and was used unchanged as the first chapter of the novel.[6] Dreamsnake was released by Houghton Mifflin in 1978, with a cover illustrated by Stephen Alexander.[7]

The story is set after a nuclear holocaust that "destroyed everyone who knew or cared about the reasons it had happened".[6][8] Most animal species are extinct, regions of the planet are radioactive, and sky sky is hidden by dust.[9] Human society is depicted as existing in a "low-tech tribalism": the character Arevin, for instance, has never having seen a book.[10] The exception is the single city of Center, which has sophisticated technology and is in contact with other planets.[6][9] The protagonist of Dreamsnake is Snake, a healer who uses snake venom in her trade. She travels with three genetically engineered snakes; a rattlesnake, named Sand, a cobra, named Mist, and a "dreamsnake" named Grass, who is described as being from an alien world, and who relieves the pain of dying patients by letting them dream.[8][11]

Story

The novel opens with Snake coming to a nomadic tribe to treat a boy, Stavin, who has a tumor. After letting her cobra Mist examine the boy, she goes to feed Mist and allow the snake to manufacture an antidote in her venom glands, leaving Grass, the dreamsnake, with Stavin to help him sleep.[12] One of the nomads, Arevin, helps Snake control Mist as she undergoes convulsions through the night, despite the terror that snakes hold for his people. She returns to Stavin in the morning to find that his parents have mortally wounded Grass, afraid he would hurt the boy. Despite her anger, she allows Mist to bite Stavin and inject the antidote. The leader of the nomads apologizes to Snake, and they give her fresh supplies. Arevin asks her to stay with them, but she explains that she needs a dreamsnake for her work, and must return home and ask for a new one. She expresses fear that the other healers will take her snakes and cast her out instead. As she leaves, Arevin asks her to return someday.[13]

Snake stops at an oasis, where she is asked to help Jesse, a woman who has injured herself falling off a horse. Jesse's partner Merideth takes Snake to their camp, leaving Snake's pony and baggage in the care of a caravan at the oasis. Snake finds that Jesse's spine has been broken by the fall, leaving her paralyzed, which Snake cannot heal.[14] Merideth and Alex, a third partner, convince Jesse that they should return to Center, where Jesse is from, in the hope that the off-worlders may be able to help her. Jesse, born to a powerful family in the city, had left when it made her feel trapped.[15] Wandering around near the camp, Snake sees the body of Jesse's horse, and realizes the area it fell is radioactive; Jesse had lain there long enough to have fatal radiation poisoning. Snake offers to let Mist bite Jesse and relieve her pain; Jesse accepts, and Meredith and Alex bid her farewell. Before she dies, Jesse tells Snake that her family is indebted to Snake, and could help her get another dreamsnake from another planet.[16]

Before setting off, Snake collects her pony at the Oasis, where friends of hers have been watching her other things and finds all her belongings have been ruined. The natives of Oasis apologize for not guarding her things better and say that a crazy came down from the hills and must have done it. Her journal is missing.

Arevin, the desert dweller, finds himself wanting to go after Snake, because he has fallen in love with her and believes that she is too hard on herself in the issue of Grass' death. He travels to the healers and tells two trustworthy ones the story of what had happened, but is surprised to find that Snake is not already there. He heads south in an attempt to find her.

Snake arrives at a village along her way and is invited to the governor's mansion by the governor's son Gabriel, an extremely handsome young man who always goes cloaked out in public. She is also asked to heal the leg of his father, who had a spear go through it. It is infected and Gabriel's father is a difficult man to treat, but Snake manages to cure him without taking the leg. She also invites Gabriel into her bed in the casual way that is done in this time. He is horrified by this, having failed in biocontrol when he was a teenager and gotten a friend pregnant. She soothes him, saying that the protections all healers receive against their snakes' venom usually renders them sterile. Snake also figures out that he was incorrectly instructed in biocontrol, and suggests another town where he might better learn and make a fresh start.

While checking in on her horses, Snake meets Melissa, a twelve-year-old, severely burned girl who hides out in the stables and assists the stablemaster, who takes credit for all her work. Her burn scars render her self-conscious in a town with such beautiful people. Melissa has been severely abused by the stablemaster, physically, mentally, and sexually, and Snake uses this knowledge to convince the mayor to free her. When she leaves for the Central city, Melissa accompanies her as her adopted child.

The pair make it to the city and are turned away, despite bringing news of Jesse, because of Snake's mention of cloning. They attempt to head back toward the healers, but must shelter in a cave to wait out the desert storms. The crazy attacks them after the storms end, and Snake captures him. He is addicted to dreamsnake venom. Snake knows of no place where so many dreamsnakes could be found together, and makes him take her to the 'broken dome', a relic of the Otherworlders' arrival ages ago, the gangleader North, and his colony of dreamsnakes.

North bears a grudge against all healers, who could have treated his gigantism if treatment had been available. He puts them both in a large, cold pit filled with dreamsnakes. At first, Snake holds Melissa above the snakes, herself immune after her medical training.

While in the pit, Snake realizes that the intense cold brings dreamsnakes to maturity, and they breed in triplets, rather than the paired sexes of Earth. She escapes the pit, with a small sack of dreamsnakes on her belt, only to find all North's associates in dreamsnake venom-induced comas, and Melissa in a basket of dreamsnakes, similarly comatose. Snake escapes back to the horses, where they are met by Arevin, who helps Melissa recover.

Reception

Ursula K. Le Guin praised the book, saying "Dreamsnake is written in a clear, quick-moving prose, with brief, lyrically intense landscape passages that take the reader straight into its half-familiar, half-strange desert world, and fine descriptions of the characters’ emotional states and moods and changes." [17] A 2012 review in The Guardian called it a "challenging, unsettling book", and said that McIntyre's fictional world was "expertly drawn".[18]

Awards

Dreamsnake won multiple awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novel,[19] the Hugo Award for Best Novel[20] and the Locus Poll Award for Best Novel.[21] It also won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Awards[22] and was nominated for the 1979 Ditmar Award in International Fiction,[23] which was won by The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey. In 1995, Dreamsnake was put on the Shortlist for the Retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award.[24]

References
  1. "1979 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved March 11, 2010.
  2. "1978 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved March 11, 2010.
  3. Wimmer, Josh (October 24, 2010), "Feminism, astronauts, and riding sidesaddle: Talking to Dreamsnake’s Vonda McIntyre", IO9, archived from the original on October 28, 2013
  4. Ashley 2007, pp. 23–26.
  5. "Nebula Awards 1974". Science Fiction Awards Database. Locus. Archived from the original on October 25, 2015. Retrieved December 6, 2011.
  6. Holland, Steve (April 4, 2019). "Vonda N McIntyre obituary". The Guardian. Archived from the original on March 29, 2020. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  7. Nicholls, Peter; Clute, John; Sleight, Graham, eds. (April 13, 2020). "McIntyre, Vonda N.". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Gollancz. Retrieved July 26, 2020.
  8. Sandomir, Richard (April 5, 2019). "Vonda N. McIntyre, 70, Champion of Women in Science Fiction, Dies". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 11, 2019. Retrieved May 8, 2020.
  9. Paulsen 1984, pp. 103-104.
  10. Cordle 2017, p. 177.
  11. Lacey 2018, pp. 374-375.
  12. McIntyre 1978, pp. 1-7.
  13. McIntyre 1978, pp. 7-22.
  14. McIntyre 1978, pp. 23-30.
  15. McIntyre 1978, pp. 33-38.
  16. McIntyre 1978, pp. 45-54.
  17. Le Guin, Ursula (June 16, 2011), "The Wild Winds of Possibility: Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake", Book View Cafe, archived from the original on August 3, 2012 (Republished from Cascadia Subduction Zone, April 2011.
  18. Jordison, Sam (April 12, 2012). "Back to the Hugos: Dreamsnake by Vonda N McIntyre". The Guardian. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  19. "Keith Stokes, Vonda N. McIntyre honored with SFWA Service Award". SWFA. March 11, 2010. Archived from the original on July 16, 2012. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
  20. "1979 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. Archived from the original on May 7, 2011. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
  21. "1979 Locus Awards". Locus Magazine. 1979. Archived from the original on August 6, 2010. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
  22. "Dreamsnake". Book View Cafe. Retrieved April 6, 2020.
  23. "1979 Ditmar Awards". Locus Magazine. Archived from the original on January 18, 2010. Retrieved June 17, 2010.
  24. "1995 Retrospective Honor List". James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Retrieved April 6, 2020.

Sources
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