Dreamsnake (Vonda N. McIntyre)

Dreamsnake
Vonda N. McIntyre
Blackstone Audio
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Healer Snake travels the land, visiting villages and nomadic tribes of desert and mountain, bringing the gifts of her training as well as those offered by her three special serpents: the albino cobra Mist, the coppery rattlesnake Sand, and the green dreamsnake Grass. Mist and Sand have been genetically engineered to produce curatives and even vaccines in their venom glands, but Grass is a special species, a serpent from another world whose bite brings peace and pleasant dreams - mostly used to ease the final hours of the terminally ill. Snake's decision to push into territories not often visited by healers comes at an unexpected cost: while healing one nomadic herder boy, she tragically misreads the local customs and the deeply-ingrained fear of the local deadly sand vipers, and his family ends up killing Grass. This is a blow not just to Snake but to the healers as a whole: nobody has ever gotten dreamsnakes to breed in captivity on Earth, and the one city where offworlders trade has shut their doors in the faces of healers for decades, choking off the supply. Without dreamsnakes, a healer cannot effectively practice their arts, so their numbers are dwindling with the supply of surviving serpents. But while on her way back to the healers' station to explain the loss (and, likely as not, be exiled for her failure), a chance encounter offers a thread of hope for redemption. Thus begins Snake's long, dangerous journey across the lands to find a new dreamsnake.

REVIEW: This classic novel, first published in 1978 (though the short story it was based on was published in 1973, famously the result of a "two random words" prompt challenge at a writing conference), won multiple awards and remains quite readable and interesting today, with a great concept in its bio-engineered medicinal snakes.
Set on an Earth made nearly unrecognizable several generations after nuclear war almost ended humanity, it doesn't overlabor the setting or backstory, letting the tale unfold with intriguing hints about the civilization that rebuilt itself upon radioactive ashes from parts old and new, familiar and alien: while some have reverted to tribal existence, the healers practice gene splicing and other advanced tech (though they have to grind their own microscope lenses and such without a global manufacturing infrastructure), and pretty much everyone, even in the most remote places, practices some form of bio-control over their own reproductive processes. Only in the city of Center does anything like what we would recognize as modern urban culture remain ubiquitous, and they've become strange and secretive and increasingly paranoid about outside contact. Still, this is not a world that's mired in doom and despair and superstition, but one where people strive to rise to the challenge of creating a new and better future, if in a piecemeal fashion. One of the things this world has mostly cast off is old gender baggage; relationships are more likely to be multi-person partnerships than male-dominated pairings, nonbinary inclinations are no longer taboo, and no roles seem to be closed or open exclusively to boys or girls. Snake's journey is one that other authors might have given to a male lead, or would've made the fact that she's a woman into a major plot point (where she faces opposition and friction just because of her gender). Even today it sometimes seem like there has to be a justification for a female lead, whereas here Snake's sexuality and gender are just part of who she is. Along the way, she picks up an unlikely companion, as well as an unknown stalker who proves pivotal in the last leg of the book. She also, unbeknownst to her, picks up a love interest who decides to follow her into the unknown, a young man from the desert tribe where Grass was killed, who has his own, if lesser, adventure tracking down the wandering healer.
The plot moves pretty well, if hardly at a breakneck pace, weaving in some pretty interesting worldbuilding with the action. Some parts toward the end feel mildly forced and the conclusion struck me as a little rushed or off-kilter for reasons I'm not sure I can put my finger on, though on the whole things wrap up reasonably well.

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