DREAMSNAKE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Vonda N. McIntyre | 288 pages | 04 Feb 2016 | Quercus Publishing | 9780857054265 | English | London, United Kingdom The Dream Snake The shimmyographers like Icarus Wing keep dreamsnakes in tanks to produce dream mist which is used for making Vurt feathers. The Scribble had been bitten on the ankle by a dreamsnake during a trip when he was 17, with certain amount of Vurt remained in his organism thus enabling him entering the Vurt and traveling between the theaters featherless. The wound kept acting up every time The Scribble approached a dreamsnake. Tristan kept a line of dreamsnake skins pinned over his fireplace. Snake is one of those heroines who makes me cheer for the possibilities of science fiction. She is definitively her own person, tough and compassionate, not afraid to do good and yet aware of her power over the life of others. She is also ultra-competent, but she still admits to her vulnerabilities. In another refreshing bit of writing, McIntyre treats the sexuality of her characters with sensitivity and nuance. Dreamsnake tells a love story between Snake and Arevin, but this love story inverts all of the disturbing elements of convention. There is palpable chemistry between Snake and Arevin, but the resolution of the story does not involve Snake giving up her autonomy or essential traits to become an "ideal" lover. They end up helping each other, and maintaining the integrity of their own persons. Part of the charm of McIntyre's treatment of the post-collapse civilization is the sheer brevity. The first hint that this planet had a nuclear war comes nearly fifty pages in: The craters were so large, spread over such a distance, that they could have only one source. Nuclear explosions had blasted them. The war itself was long over, almost forgotten, for it had destroyed everyone who knew or cared about the reasons it had happened. A few pre-collapse bits of technology have survived and figure in the story, but again these are mainly breezed over. I was wary of reading this book due to my phobia of snakes. I realize well enough that snakes in my area of North America are harmless to humans and crucial to their ecological niche. I wanted to clap for the final line. Things that took some effort: - It's still 70s scifi. None of these are a problem, but if you hate all tropes of 70s scifi, you won't escape them here, they're just done a little more cheekily. There are a few parts that get dark. I think McIntyre did a good job keeping the darkness mostly honest, certainly better than many more current works I've read, but it's still there and tough and imperfect. A few other things, too, just sort of get dropped on you and either you never figure it out like where this world is? It's there, so if you like "event" based books rather than "character" based books, it'll get there, but it's much more character- focused, I'd say. I'm really impressed and glad to have listened to this hat tip to the narrator, too, who did a great job with the voices. An excellent work of classic science fiction that manages to be engaging even today. I will definitely read more by this author. View all 4 comments. This is a wonderfully patient, subtle, and intimate novel, unusually so in the SFF canon. My mother was a nurse, which led me to being was especially drawn in with the healer Snake as she made her way through her travels. Some of the pacing in the latter third was a little off, and there were aspects of the story of the major antagonist that didnt quite make sense, but overall Im very glad to have spent time with this multi-award-winning classic. May 23, Mike Moore rated it it was ok. Look, I read a lot of science fiction. Enough that I would mention it. So I have a pretty high tolerance for silliness. This book overwhelmed my tolerance and left me staggered by the sheer nonsense of it all. Welcome to a post-apocalyptic future where isolated communities blunder about in moral turpitude waiting for an oddly naive young woman to come straighten them out with good sense and her trusty snakes. You see, snakes are used as drug dispensers in the future, and the woman who's also Look, I read a lot of science fiction. You see, snakes are used as drug dispensers in the future, and the woman who's also named Snake is a healer, so she carries around a cobra and a rattler for medicinal purposes. She's been entrusted by her teachers to walk the earth like that Caine dude. They trained her in medicine and herpetology, but somehow neglected to mention that other people might have odd customs like not respecting other people's property, drug addiction or killing snakes. Each of these come as a profound shock when she encounters them. Anyway, off goes our intrepid heroine. She meets a series of people whose incredible obliviousness creates problems that she handily solves. The fact that the problems are sometimes horrible is pretty well negated by their ridiculousness. In one instance, I imagine the mayor of a town who was shocked and outraged by Snake's discovery of a rape victim saying to his trusted adviser after she leaves "Say, whose idea was it anyway to have a brutal and overbearing unmarried man become the guardian for a disfigured girl on the verge of puberty? In retrospect, that wasn't an obvious choice. There are numerous loose ends and holes in the book, but the book doesn't suffer for them because it seems perfectly obvious how they would all play out. If anything, I'm glad the author didn't bother to explain more. The publisher says: They called the healer Snake, and she bore the name proudly, for the medicine she distilled from the venom of the viper she carried with her was a potent cure; and the soothing power of her other companion, the alien dreamsnake, banished fear. But the primitive ignorance of those she served killed her dreamsnake and wrecked her career - for dreamsnakes were dreadfully rare, and Center would not grant her another. Snake's only hope was to find a new dreamsnake - and on her The publisher says: They called the healer Snake, and she bore the name proudly, for the medicine she distilled from the venom of the viper she carried with her was a potent cure; and the soothing power of her other companion, the alien dreamsnake, banished fear. Snake's only hope was to find a new dreamsnake - and on her quest, she was pursued by two implacable followers, one driven by love, one by fear and need. Me: I enjoyed this short little tale of a healer trying to find her place in the world, making mistakes as we all do and struggling to find a way out of a bad situation. Finding companionship, love and an adopted daughter. A strong female main character, solving problems competently yet accepting help when it is offered. A book which passes the Bechdel test with flying colours [there is more than one female character and they talk to each other about something besides men]. My only complaint was that it was too short—there were several interesting items which tickled my curiosity and made me wish that there was a sequel or that the original was a bit thicker, with more detail. For example, how did Earth get to this post-apocalyptic state? Who are the aliens who created the domes and brought the strange plants and dreamsnakes to Earth? Have they stuck around or who exactly is in the intact city dome? In a world where there are still so many books in which the female characters are stiff as cardboard or stereotypical caricatures , this book from the s really shines as a book where I felt real affection for Snake. She is a realistic woman, with emotions and dilemmas that I can relate to. A very odd book by modern standards, but one that is strikingly of its era. Manages to do some things very badly dialogue, most of the characterisation the central character is solid and likeable but a Mary Sue and not all that distinctive, while the supporting cast are mostly two or fewer -dimensional and also somewhat MSish , a lot of the plot details , yet do others very well descriptive prose; setting and its exploration, some of the emotional stuff. Sort of like a less-good Ursula Le A very odd book by modern standards, but one that is strikingly of its era. Sort of like a less-good Ursula Le Guin novel, really. Slow, meandering social science fiction. Probably not selling it well. It is really interesting in its setting, and in the way it gradually reveals the nature of the setting, and also in its overarching plot it doesn't have much of one, so what it does have is very free, and hence surprising. Special mention should be made of the idea of a society that is in some ways more backward than ours, but in other ways more developed - normally, primitive or post-apocalyptic societies are just that, but McIntyre takes the more interesting and probably more realistic approach that some skills and technologies are able to survive even a general deterioriation in economic conditions, and maybe even may continue to progress.