QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

Today I’m reviewing Dreamsnake, Vonda McIntyre’s 1978 science fiction novel which has the rare distinction of winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Dreamsnake was expanded from a novelette, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand”—I already wrote about that novelette in my earlier review of McIntyre’s collection Fireflood and Other Stories in this column. The first chapter is essentially identical to the earlier story, and the plot develops from there. I’ve been hoping to read this novel for a while now, as mentioned in my earlier post, and now my local book club is reading it too—though I wrote my review before our discussion.

(Page numbers that follow are from the 1994 Bantam Spectra edition, because this is the version I read.)

The protagonist of Dreamsnake, Snake, is a healer who travels an Earth that’s been ravaged by nuclear war. She uses genetically modified snakes whose venom can be used to tailor treatments to the individual, healing even serious conditions such as large tumors. Each healer also carries a dreamsnake, a rare and precious extraterrestrial creature whose bite can bring dreams or a painless death. Yet as Snake strays far from the lands she is familiar with, she is caught up in a cross-cultural misunderstanding and loses her dreamsnake. She sets out to obtain another one, and encounters a wide range of trouble while trying to carry on her trade, meeting many people of different cultures and beliefs, sometimes bearing longstanding hatreds and superstitions.

Before we take a look at the details, a caveat: this is a heartbreaking novel. I had to take multiple breaks just to assimilate the events, especially in the first half of the book. Please be advised that there are detailed descriptions of human and animal death; always thoughtful, never reveling in violence, which makes the impact of it even more forceful. There is also a recurring thread of both physical violence and sexual abuse directed at children, though the abuse itself is not shown.

It is made clear on the very first page that Dreamsnake’s setting is polyamory-normative; Snake is attempting to heal the child of a triad. Later we meet another triad and also hear about another family group that’s comprised of six adults; though we also find out that not every culture on this postapocalyptic Earth is similar in this respect—I’ll say more about this in the spoilers section below. Even without giving away plot points, polyamory becomes important in more than one respect.

And it’s important to note that this one aspect of non-normative gender-sex-sexuality doesn’t stand alone in the narrative; rather, we get to see other aspects incorporated into the world as well. An intriguing theme is how the book approaches contraception, by people learning through a process of… biofeedback, I assume, how to raise and lower the temperature of their gonads. This called “biocontrol” in the book and it is less science-fictional than it sounds. While I don’t know anyone who’s used this method for contraception, it is possible to learn to consciously control the temperature of tissues inside the body to an extent; autogenic training uses this to promote relaxation. (This method had already been developed when the book was written.) McIntyre was a biologist, and as a semi-lapsed health scientist, I can tell that both this and many other aspects of future science in the book are based on much less extrapolation than it might seem.

There is a lot of queerness in the book and many related themes beyond that too, so it is interesting to see that Snake herself seems largely straight. She ends up in a relationship with a man rather abruptly, but people do ask her (and also the love-interest character separately from her) about whether they would be more interested in same-sex relations. This all happens matter-of-factly, just like casual sex, with a lot of care put toward considerations of consent. (This is clearly a pre-AIDS book, though there is mention of STDs.) The love interest feels bad when he finds out he’d accidentally turned down another male character due to a cultural misunderstanding—he simply didn’t realize he was being asked to spend the night together.

There are many small but carefully considered details planted throughout the text, for example here is a small aside that reveals Snake is a gender-neutral appellation: “The Snake immediately preceding her had been only forty-three when he died, but the other two had each outlasted a century.” (p. 194)

Another aspect of the story initially seems like one of these small details, but it has broader relevance, and keeps on recurring as something that affects Snake’s mobility. She has arthritis related to an autoimmune condition, and this is explicitly linked to her being a healer:

The phrasing has not necessarily aged well, but keep in mind—this is almost two decades before the first disability-themed anthology project in SFF, a tiny chapbook, and almost forty years before widespread discussions of disability in SFF. (You can find my bibliography of disability and body positivity SFF anthologies on my website.) Because this text is such a forerunner to these later developments, I want to discuss further how it engages with disability and treatment/cures in many other ways—spoilers from here onward.

North, the main antagonist, is a man who hoards dreamsnakes in order to distribute their venom to people, sort of like a drug dealer. He has albinism and pituitary gigantism, and this reads like the simplistic trope equating bodily difference with evil—except that McIntyre does a lot to destabilize the trope in the novel. First, in addition to Snake explicitly identified as mobility disabled, Snake’s adopted daughter Melissa is disfigured due to severe burns, which is immediately read by the City representative as evidence that she’s a mutant even though she isn’t.

North can also be read as a kind of psychedelic healer as opposed to a drug dealer figure—even though he’s clearly positioned as the antagonist, he repeatedly states that he helps people deal with their trauma, and the depictions of his people lying on the ground in the clearing evoke Timothy Leary’s consciousness-expanding group sessions. The only person who is clearly addicted to dreamsnake venom—the “crazy” who stalks and attacks Snake (this term could use further analysis too)—takes a much higher dose than North’s other followers. If there is a moral—and Snake is the kind of person who likes morals—it is that some things are helpful only in moderation. That this is not some reactionary anti-drug message is further underscored by the way some other key aspects of the Sixties counterculture, like free love, are also major parts of the novel; and that Snake, her culture, and the other surrounding cultures all consider the dreamsnakes as an important part of healing.

Snake sees North only in a negative light up until the very end. But then, intriguingly, she reconsiders her attitude toward him by noticing and acknowledging the negative aspects of her own motivations and behavior, not by seeing North’s action more positively:

Earlier, North also pushes back on Snake’s ableism, which likewise didn’t exist as a term back then. Snake states that healers could have “helped” him if they had been able to treat him earlier, at which point North goes into a rage: “Do you think I want to hear that? Do you think I want to keep hearing that I could have been ordinary?” (p. 265) It’s not clear from this and his subsequent comments whether North refuses to be ordinary, or whether he disdains Snake’s ultimately useless comment that he should have been treated earlier, when that clearly hadn’t been possible, and he would have in fact preferred a chance to be ordinary. Possibly, maybe most likely, the answer has aspects of both.

Another intriguing but spoilery aspect of the novel is the reveal that the dreamsnakes copulate in triplets. Why hasn’t this possibility occurred to Snake before? She worked on dreamsnake biology before she ventured forth and traveled in the lands of the desert peoples, who generally have larger partner groups than a male-female pair. Snake reflects on the healers’ isolationism and “ethnocentrism” (p. 287) that led to these biases—”mononormativity” as a term would come into being decades later, but I get the sense that McIntyre was circling around this and related concepts without having convenient terminology for them, just like with ableism.