Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
1979 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award Winner (Review contains minor spoilers)
This story is set in some indeterminate desert location on Earth in the indeterminate future, after an apocalypse and humanity has mostly returned to approximately the equivalent of the Medieval period, with one or two hold-out bastions of advanced technology capable of things like genetic engineering. The story follows an itinerant healer who roams the country on foot, trading healing services to get by, and her most prized possessions are three rare snakes that have been genetically altered to aid with healing in various ways. The story opens with some suspicious and superstitious villagers killing the rarest and most powerful of the Healer's snakes (the Dreamsnake) out of fear. The majority of the novel then follows the healer as she tries to find a replacement snake, and deal with the guilt and insecurities that arise from losing something so powerful, particularly when faced with dying patients that she could have healed if she still had the snake.
I found this novel interesting in the sense it is very, very borderline between science fiction and fantasy. You could easily substitute "genetically modified healing snakes" with "magical healing snakes" and it wouldn't make a difference. And sure, at one point a character dies of radiation poisoning, but it could just as easily have been a magical curse. To my mind nothing in this story was necessarily science fiction and anything that the writer wanted to happen was handwaved as "advanced technology", and as such there was nothing in this book that really held my interest.
It was a character-driven story, the healer dealing with her own personal issues, taking on an apprentice, dealing with various forms of prejudice and superstition as she travelled. It was written well enough, I had no trouble picturing the setting or relating to the characters. The story just felt very small when there were hints of the apocalypse, lost tech, and alien contact that just weren't dealt with in any way, and it gave me the feeling that we really weren't following the people in this world that had the most interesting stories to tell.
All in all I'll probably forget this book quite quickly, not as bad in any way, just not interesting to me. I'd have to recommend it to people that enjoy a wandering traveller fantasy story. 2/5
This story is set in some indeterminate desert location on Earth in the indeterminate future, after an apocalypse and humanity has mostly returned to approximately the equivalent of the Medieval period, with one or two hold-out bastions of advanced technology capable of things like genetic engineering. The story follows an itinerant healer who roams the country on foot, trading healing services to get by, and her most prized possessions are three rare snakes that have been genetically altered to aid with healing in various ways. The story opens with some suspicious and superstitious villagers killing the rarest and most powerful of the Healer's snakes (the Dreamsnake) out of fear. The majority of the novel then follows the healer as she tries to find a replacement snake, and deal with the guilt and insecurities that arise from losing something so powerful, particularly when faced with dying patients that she could have healed if she still had the snake.
I found this novel interesting in the sense it is very, very borderline between science fiction and fantasy. You could easily substitute "genetically modified healing snakes" with "magical healing snakes" and it wouldn't make a difference. And sure, at one point a character dies of radiation poisoning, but it could just as easily have been a magical curse. To my mind nothing in this story was necessarily science fiction and anything that the writer wanted to happen was handwaved as "advanced technology", and as such there was nothing in this book that really held my interest.
It was a character-driven story, the healer dealing with her own personal issues, taking on an apprentice, dealing with various forms of prejudice and superstition as she travelled. It was written well enough, I had no trouble picturing the setting or relating to the characters. The story just felt very small when there were hints of the apocalypse, lost tech, and alien contact that just weren't dealt with in any way, and it gave me the feeling that we really weren't following the people in this world that had the most interesting stories to tell.
All in all I'll probably forget this book quite quickly, not as bad in any way, just not interesting to me. I'd have to recommend it to people that enjoy a wandering traveller fantasy story. 2/5