1978 science fiction novel by Vonda McIntyre
Dreamsnake is a 1978 science fiction novel by American writer Vonda N. McIntyre. It is an expansion of her 1973 novelette "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand", for which she won her first Nebula Award in 1974. The story is set on Earth after a nuclear holocaust. The central character, Snake, is a healer who uses genetically modified serpents to cure sickness—one snake is an alien "dreamsnake", whose venom gives dying people pleasant dreams. The novel follows Snake as she seeks to replace her dreamsnake after its death.
The book is considered an example of second-wave feminism in science fiction. McIntyre subverted conventionally gendered narratives by rewriting a typical heroic quest to place a woman at its center, and by using devices such as avoiding gender pronouns to challenge expectations about characters' gender identities. "Dreamsnake" also explored varying social structures and sexual paradigms from a feminist perspective, and examined themes of healing and cross-cultural interaction.
The novel was well-received, winning the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Poll Award in 1979. The strength and self-sufficiency of Snake as a protagonist were noted by several commentators. Reviewers also praised McIntyre's writing and the book's themes. Scholar Diane Wood wrote that "Dreamsnake" demonstrated "science fiction's potential to produce aesthetic pleasure through experimentation with linguistic and cultural codes", and author Ursula K. Le Guin called it "a book like a mountain stream—fast, clean, clear, exciting, beautiful".
Background and setting.
In 1971, Vonda N. McIntyre, then living in Seattle, set up the Clarion West writers' workshop, which she helped run through 1973. One of the workshop's instructors was Ursula K. Le Guin. During a 1972 workshop session, one of the 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, which also incorporated two other pieces by McIntyre: "The Broken Dome" and "The Serpent's Death", both published in 1978. "Dreamsnake", McIntyre's second novel, was released by Houghton Mifflin in 1978, with a cover illustration by Stephen Alexander.
The story is set after a nuclear holocaust that "destroyed everyone who knew or cared about the reasons it had happened". Most animal species are extinct, regions of the planet are radioactive, and the sky is hidden by dust. Human society is depicted as existing in what journalist Sam Jordison describes as "low-tech tribalism": the character Arevin, for instance, has never seen a book. The exception is the single city of Center, which has sophisticated technology and is in contact with other planets, but which has a rigidly hierarchical structure and does not permit outsiders to enter. The city also serves as the setting for McIntyre's first novel, "The Exile Waiting" (1975). 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, from an alien world, and who relieves the pain of dying patients by letting them dream.
Synopsis.
The novel opens with Snake coming to a nomadic tribe to treat a boy, Stavin, who has a tumor. While her cobra Mist manufactures an antidote in her venom glands, she leaves Grass, the dreamsnake, with Stavin to help him sleep. One of the nomads, Arevin, helps Snake control Mist as the cobra 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 Arevin asks her to stay with them, but Snake 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.
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 baggage at the oasis. Snake finds that Jesse has broken her spine, leaving her paralyzed, something Snake cannot heal. 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. 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 Merideth 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.
Returning to the oasis, Snake finds that someone has rifled through her belongings and stolen her journal. Grum, a caravan leader also camped there, says it was the work of a "crazy". Back among the nomads, Arevin decides to go after Snake. Snake crosses the Western desert to the town of Mountainside, where the mayor's son Gabriel asks her to heal the mayor. While staying with them, Snake invites Gabriel to sleep with her. After he expresses hesitation, she learns that he impregnated a friend as a result of being improperly taught "biocontrol", and that this led to a difficult relationship with his father. She tells him he can still learn, and suggests he find a different teacher when he leaves Mountainside, as he intends to do.
While checking on her horses, Snake meets Melissa, a girl with a severely burned face who helps the stablemaster, who takes credit for her work. Her scars make her self-conscious of her appearance in a town of otherwise beautiful people. Shortly after, Snake is attacked on her way to the mayor's house by a man she assumes is the crazy. She discovers that Melissa has been physically and sexually abused by the stablemaster, and uses this knowledge to convince the mayor to free her. Melissa accompanies Snake as her adopted daughter when Snake leaves for Center. Snake explains to her that dreamsnakes are very rare, and that the healers have not found a way to make them breed. Meanwhile, Arevin arrives at the healer's dwelling north of Mountainside, but he is told that Snake is not there, and goes south to find her. In Mountainside, he is briefly detained on suspicion of having been Snake's attacker, but is released.
Snake and Melissa cross the eastern desert and reach Center, but are turned away, like every previous emissary from the healers. Soon after they return to the mountains, they are attacked again by the crazy, who demands the dreamsnake, and collapses when he learns the serpent is dead. Snake learns he is addicted to dreamsnake venom. Snake makes him take her to a community whose leader, North, possesses several dreamsnakes, and occasionally allows his followers to be bitten by them as a reward. The community lives in a "broken dome", a relic of a past civilization. North, who bears all healers a grudge, puts Snake in a large, cold pit filled with dreamsnakes. 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. Her immunity to venom allows her to survive the pit, and eventually to climb out. While North's henchmen are in venom-induced comas, she finds Melissa similarly comatose, and escapes with her and a bag of dreamsnakes. She is met outside by Arevin, who helps Melissa recover.
Themes and structure.
"Dreamsnake" is considered an exemplar of second-wave feminism in science fiction, which had largely been devoted to masculine adventures prior to a body of science fiction writing by women in the 1960s and 1970s that subverted conventional narratives. McIntyre uses the post-apocalyptic setting to explore a variety of social structures and sexual paradigms from a feminist perspective. By giving female desire a prominent place, she explores gender relations in the communities Snake visits. As in McIntyre's later "Starfarers" books, women are depicted in many leadership positions. The archetype of a heroic quest is rewritten: the central figure is a woman, and the challenges faced require healing and care, rather than force, to overcome. A conventional fictional pattern of a hero being pursued, or waited for, by a female lover, is reversed, as Arevin follows Snake, who receives his support but does not require rescue. Gender expectations are also subverted through the character of Merideth, whose gender is never disclosed, as McIntyre entirely avoids using gender pronouns, thereby creating a "feminist construct" that suggests a person's character and abilities are more important than their gender. Characters are often introduced with reference to their profession, and later casually revealed to be female, thereby potentially subverting readers' expectations.
The book's feminist themes are also related to an exploration of healing and wholeness, according to scholar Inge-Lise Paulsen. Snake is a professional healer, ostensibly fitting the stereotype of a nurturing woman, but McIntyre depicts her as someone who is a healer because she was trained to be and because it was an ethical choice, and not as a consequence of her femininity. Although she finds a family in Arevin and Melissa, that is not where Snake seeks her "ultimate fulfillment as a woman": her triumph at the story's end comes from her discovery of the dreamsnakes' breeding habits. Love is depicted as insufficient for a relationship; Arevin must learn to trust Snake's strength, and resist the temptation to protect her. The ideal of mutual respect is also shown in the utopian structure of the nomads' society. The nomads respect individual agency, in contrast to the people of the city, who isolate themselves from the world from a desire to protect themselves. Paulsen sees this as a cultural tendency typical of patriarchy, and writes that McIntyre's depiction of an ethical need for wholeness and an understanding of connections between the facets of society is also found in the work of Le Guin and in Doris Lessing's "Canopus in Argos" series.
In "Dreamsnake" McIntyre uses language conveying complex and multiple meanings, thus challenging readers to engage deeply. Snake's name, and the snakes she uses, invoke images drawn from religion and mythology. For instance, modern-day physicians in the United States use a caduceus, or staff with intertwining snakes, as an emblem: in Greek mythology, the caduceus is the symbol of Hermes, and signifies that its carrier is a bearer of divine knowledge. Snakes have other symbolic meanings, including both death and rejuvenation. They are a recurring motif in fiction, being depicted in widely varying roles and forms. Their symbolic association with both poison and healing, for instance, connects McIntyre's protagonist to Asclepius, the Roman god of healing, who carries a serpent-entwined rod. These dual meanings are illustrated by the dreamsnake Grass, who in the story is a powerful tool for the healer while also being an object of fear for the desert people. Snake's use of serpents plays on the biblical myth of Genesis, reversing it so the woman controls the snakes. The depiction of Center, a place of sophisticated technology that has cut itself off from the rest of society, is associated with an exploration of the relationship between "centre and margins, insider and outsider, self and other" that is also found in McIntyre's "The Exile Waiting" and "Superluminal" (1983). Center exhibits a rigid social order; in contrast, social change occurs outside, at the margins of society, and Center, despite its name, is rendered irrelevant.
"Dreamsnake", along with much of McIntyre's work, also explores the effects of freedom and imprisonment. Many of her characters attempt to free themselves from shackles of varying kinds, including self-imposed psychological limitations, the challenges created by physical infirmity or appearance, and oppression by other humans. Snake encounters two freed slaves who work for the mayor of Mountainside, who freed them by banning slavery in his town. One bears a ring in her heel as a relic of enslavement; when Snake