Dreamsnake is a 1978 Science Fiction novel written by Vonda N. McIntyre; winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Snake is a traveling healer, using the chemically-altered venom of her pet vipers to treat various ills in a somewhat undefined postapocalyptic setting. And early in the story, a well-meaning but paranoid and misinformed individual kills the titular animal... which just so happens to be both important to her job and incredibly rare. As the only alternative is to come back to her teachers and almost certainly end her healer's career, Snake decides to try to find out something which no one had been able to discover: the natural source of dreamsnakes. During her travel she is forced to make difficult ethical decisions, which subtly introduce an element of An Aesop and comment on some problems brought to light in The '70s.
Dreamsnake contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Just a moment before Ras is properly introduced, he's slapped his foster daughter Melissa across the face hard enough to leave a mark. It later turns out that he takes credit for all of her work. And that's tame compared to what else he's done to her.
- Achievements in Ignorance: Healers have been trying to breed dreamsnakes for centuries, but all attempts to do so have failed, and they're losing more dreamsnakes even with the cloning they do. North figured it out more or less by accident, having discovered a colony of dreamsnakes still living in a broken dome.
- Acquired Poison Immunity: Healer training includes building immunity to the venom of most types of snakes, to avoid the occupational hazards of handling them. They still get sick from them (especially if the snake strikes a vital part of the boy), but they won't die. Unfortunately, it also messes with their body in other ways, giving Snake arthritis before her time and making most of them sterile.
- Aerith and Bob: Most names are in the Bob category (Merideth, Gabriel, Melissa, Thad). But you've also got obviously-assumed names (Snake, Silver, North) and a few oddities (Arevin, Grum, Ao, Larril).
- After the End, although we never find out if it's set on Earth in the far future or on some other planet.
- However, the
Word of God says at some time
that it is Earth.
- However, the
- Albinos Are Freaks: North's pathologic hatred of healers is because they could never do anything about his albinism or gigantism, traits that he hated about himself.
- Annoying Patient: The mayor.
- The Atoner: Snake herself, as she believes her arrogance lead to Grass' death and wishes to make amends by finding more dreamsnakes for the healers.
- Author Appeal: Group or at least triad marriages and biocontrol.
- Badass Adorable: Melissa is twelve, so tiny as to look closer to nine, sweet, vulnerable, and almost preternaturally good with animals. She's also probably the bravest character in the book. Case in point: she rescued horses from a stable fire—getting badly scarred as a result—at the age of eight, and is one of the two people who can ride Gabriel's ill-tempered horse.
- Beauty Equals Goodness: Subverted. Mountainside is a fucked-up place, and the burn-scarred Melissa is by far its most impressive scion.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Dreamsnakes, as it turns out. They breed in triplets, which is why previous healer experiments that used pairs have failed.
- Broken Pedestal: Center, the one major city left on Earth, seems like a distant paradise at first, one with access to amazing medical and technological advances that might be able to solve the protagonists' problems. This utopian view is soon shattered by their harsh rejection of Snake and Melissa, as well as the reveal that they refuse to help outsiders, but will help enslave them. Reading the related book The Exile Waiting completely destroys any remaining idealism, as the city turns out to be an outright hive of scum and villainy.
- But We Used a Condom!: Well, But I Know My Biocontrol: The reason for Gabriel's self-imposed chastity.
- But What About the Astronauts?: Averted. Snake mentions that there are people who were living on other planets from before the war and offworlders are mentioned to visit the Center. But since the Center itself is cut off from the rest of the world, no one has ever met one and they're basically irrelevant to most people.
- Childhood Marriage Promise: Gabriel and Leah had one. Then, shit happened.
- City in a Bottle: The Center is a city inside a mountain that has almost completely cut itself off from the outside world. While Snake never gets to see it since they don't allow her in, they appear to have more advanced technology than the other people, see the outside world as diseased and lie to their children about it, and are the only ones who offworlders contact.
- Cool Horse: Swift's just big and pretty, but Squirrel is tiger-striped.
- Dead Guy Junior: Snake is mentioned to be the fourth to bear her name, and feels she has a lot to live up to since the first two Snakes were legendary among healers. It's what drives her to atone for Grass' death, and as the one to discover how to breed dreamsnakes, it's likely that she will continue her name's legacy.
- Death World: The world is covered in the remnants of nuclear war, and the book mostly takes place in a Thirsty Desert.
- Everyone Is Bi: The likeliest possible exception is Arevin. And his obliviousness to Thad's pass at him is treated more as Culture Clash—and the result of his single-targeting on Snake—than necessarily evidence of heterosexuality. That said, Snake does mention that Gabriel might "prefer men" when she's propositions him, so clearly other sexualities are still acknowledged, just rarer than they are in a heteronormative society.
- Fantastic Drug: It turns out that dreamsnake venom can be addictive when abused. This is how North controls the denizens of the broken dome.
- Fantasy Contraception: By way of something akin to advanced biofeedback, no less. Everyone is taught it at a young age. Gabriel learned it wrong, and fail ensued.
- Feminist Fantasy: The book was published at the height of second-wave feminism, and bears many of the hallmarks of the movement. Biocontrol has given people complete sexual and reproductive freedom, with zero stigma attached to homosexuality, polyamory, premarital sex, contraception or abortion, to the point where even the conservative and contrarian Mayor is appalled that Ras refused to teach Melissa biocontrol. Non-nuclear families like Merideth's triad and the healers are shown, men and women seem to be equal, and the key to breeding dreamsnakes is to see beyond the typical male-female binary that had been used up to this point.
- Frontier Doctor: Snake effectively is one.
- Great Offscreen War: There was a massive nuclear war that resulted in Earth being the wasteland it is in the novel that has left vast craters and radioactive material all over the landscape. It's happened long enough ago that no one knows who started it or even the nations involved, as the war killed off anyone who knew or cared about such things.
- Happily Adopted: Tends to be true of healers in general, as they're sterile or effectively so. Snake adopts Melissa about halfway through the book.
- Healing Serpent: The main tool of the healers. Sand and Mist are genetically modified to produce medicine as venom when fed certain compounds, while Grass is an alien snake used for painless euthanasia.
- Hypocrite: The Center refers to the mutants of the outside and the healers' genetic experiments as "abominations", but Snake notes that with the low amount of people in the Center itself and no contact with the outside world, they're likely heavily inbred. They also snootily tell Snake that they aren't going to give their advanced medical technology to "monsters" like the healers, but are more than happy to sell special crystal rings to slavers.
- I Know Your True Name: Downplayed. There's no actual magical component to it, but Arevin's people don't give away their names easily due to superstitions and culture.
- It's All My Fault: Snake is angry when the dreamsnake dies but she doesn't blame the people who killed it, as killing a strange snake near a child is a perfectly rational response for people whose main experience with snakes are deadly pit vipers. Instead, she places the blame on herself for failing to tell them Grass was harmless and for being arrogant enough to assume that they wouldn't dare touch her snakes even if they thought a child might be in danger.
- Master of Your Domain: Characters use "biocontrol" for (at very least) contraception and suppression of hair growth.
- Older Than They Look: Snake thinks that twelve-year-old Melissa is around eight or nine when they first meet.
- Only the Chosen May Ride: Gabriel's huge, ornery pinto stallion will only allow Gabriel or Melissa on his back. In fact, it's the sight of Melissa expertly exercising said horse that removes any last doubt Snake might have had as to her honesty.
- Organic Technology: The Healers have bred special snakes that can create healing venoms when they ingest certain compounds, which can be used on anything from fevers to tumors. Bioluminescent "light cells" have also developed as an alternative to electricity for people who don't have access to methane or solar.
- Polluted Wasteland: While it's not completely polluted, the landscape is covered with radioactive craters that are still irradiated and will be for centuries to come. The people in the City believe that everything outside is deadly and teach their children accordingly, which leads to Jesse's death since she assumed that since they lied about the outside world killing people, they were also lying about the craters being radioactive.
- Polyamory: It's the monogamous characters like Arevin who stand out. And then, it turns out that dreamsnakes are three-sexed.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Especially when committed upon an undersized and burn-scarred twelve-year-old by her vicious scumbag of a surrogate father.
- Redemption Quest: Snake decides to go and find new dreamsnakes to redeem herself for losing Grass. She knows the chances of finding even one lost dreamsnake are incredibly low, but she feels obligated to try even if it means spending her whole life searching. She succeeds beyond her wildest dreams when she not only discovers a nest full of dreamsnakes, but also the secret to breeding them.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Invoked by the fact that someone's violent ophiophobia is what gets Snake into trouble in the first place; she leaves titular creature Grass—who has a non-lethal hallucinogenic venom and is about as dangerous as a vine snake—with a sick child who's taken a liking to him, and a family member panics and slices the tiny, docile creature in half. Reconstructed with sand vipers; not even Snake can find much that she likes about the ugly, vicious beasts.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Mountainside. See Beauty Equals Goodness and What Measure Is a Non-Cute? for why. Also, they rather casually sell their children into indenture (and—as Larril can attest—don't think twice about maiming any bondservant who takes exception).
- Unspecified Apocalypse: To the point that it isn't even clear if it's Earth or not. There was some sort of nuclear war, as shown by the radioactive craters, but nobody knows who was fighting or why.
- We Will Have Euthanasia in the Future: Jesse, dying of radiation poisoning, asks Snake to give her a quicker and less painful death. She suffers a brain aneurysm moments later, and likely dies before Mist can bite.
- What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Mountainside is made of this trope. Melissa's burn scars—earned in an act of heroism, at the age of eight—make so much of a social outcast out of her that when her foster father verbally abuses her in front of the mayor, the mayor argues that it's for her own good. It takes the revelation that he's been molesting her for him to be declared unfit.
- Would Hurt a Child: Ras has no qualms about beating, invalidating, and demoralizing Melissa (and it later turns out that he's also been raping her). The citizens of Mountainside passively allow this on the grounds that Melissa is visibly scarred and therefore no longer pretty enough to be relevant (although revelation of the rape is the last straw). Later, North puts her in a basket of angry dreamsnakes in order to indirectly hurt Snake. Melissa comes very close to dying of shock and hypothermia as a result.
