Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (Jo Fletcher Books, 2016)

Originally published in Vector #285 (Spring 2017)

During the 1970s, four novels managed a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novel:  Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974), and Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake (1978). On the basis of this company, Dreamsnake should be considered one of the unquestioned classics of the genre. However, while not unknown, it is clear that the novel does not have the same name recognition as these peers, nor has it been republished like the others as part of a series of classics, such as Gollancz’s SF Masterworks [in fact, as pointed out by a Vector reader, it was republished in Gollancz’s Classic SF series]. Indeed, this reissue from Jo Fletcher Books appears to be the first mass market paperback edition in the UK since Pan published it in 1979.

Similarly, despite being at the centre of American feminist sf in the 1970s, McIntyre does not have the same renown as Le Guin or Joanna Russ or James Tiptree Jnr. She tends to feature in critical accounts of that period as a bit-player: one of the other participants in the ‘Women and Science Fiction’ symposium organised by Jeffrey Smith and published as Khatru 3 & 4 (1975); one of the co-editors of the 1976 anthology Aurora: Beyond Equality in which Tiptree’s story ‘Houston, Houston, Do you Read?’ and Le Guin’s essay ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ were both first published. Sarah Lefanu denies trying to construct a hierarchy of feminism in her book, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), but that is nonetheless what she does by describing Dreamsnake as essentialist. On Lefanu’s reading, McIntyre’s fiction is feminised rather than feminist because, in attempting to rebalance the relationship between men and women, it implicitly accepts the naturalness of sexual difference rather than challenging the social construction of gender.

However, even if the stance of McIntyre’s fiction was considered unfashionable in the 1980s and 1990s, values do eventually change. Constructivist approaches to gender are no longer automatically considered to be the most progressive or radical. While it is useful to know the reception history of a book there is no reason why that should be allowed to outweigh new readings in changed times. In this respect, the relative neglect of Dreamsnake is perhaps an advantage because it allows us to read it afresh as a contemporary text in a way that is simply no longer possible in the case of something as well known as, say, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

In fact, Dreamsnake, with its post-apocalyptic setting and young female protagonist, would have fitted comfortably beside Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water on the 2015 Clarke Award shortlist. The novel begins with Snake, a healer, tending to a small sick boy as his parents hover anxiously in the background. The desert surroundings and other factors indicate a nomadic society but crucial indicators of difference complicate our reading of this situation. For a start, in a pattern that will gain significance over the duration of the novel, there are three parents but more immediately striking is the fact that Snake actually uses snakes to heal people. Specifically, she is able to use the rattlesnake and the cobra, which she carries around with her in a special case, to synthesise and inject – through their bites – complex drugs into her patients. She also has a third snake, the rare and mysterious dreamsnake of the title, which she uses as part of the healing process. However, when she leaves her dreamsnake with the small boy to comfort him while she prepares the drugs he needs, his parents become anxious and kill the snake. This action sets up the plot of the novel for Snake either has to return to the healers’ settlement and risk being stripped of her status for losing such a valuable snake or she has to find another one somewhere.

Eventually, she decides she needs to go to Center, a sealed city which still has connections with the offworld colonies from where the dreamsnakes originate. Her arrival there, around about two-thirds of the way through the novel, sets up an interesting contrast in technology. By now we have seen that the nomadic societies and scattered townships through which Snake has travelling are not as primitive as they first appeared. It turns out that Snake herself made her dreamsnake and four others by painstakingly transplanting DNA through a micropipette in the healers’ laboratories; a process that she can no longer repeat due to the arthritis that is a side product of the healers’ own gene fixes. By linking such techniques to non-hierarchical ways of living, McIntyre is claiming science as the ally of progressive politics; a position that was presumably supported by her own background as a geneticist. Significantly, Center turns hostile towards her at exactly the moment she talks approvingly of cloning.

If this belief in science suggests 1970s optimism rather than twenty-first century pessimism, then it should also be considered that the science McIntyre privileges is definitely not instrumental. The world she depicts is one where all humans can learn to exercise control over their own bodily processes: ‘biocontrol’. Crucially to the generally egalitarian nature of the societies McIntyre depicts, it is considered to be men’s responsibility to ensure contraception through biocontrol of the temperature in their testes. This key social norm is supported by an even more fundamental one: the necessity for consent in all human interactions. Snake wouldn’t even heal someone who didn’t consent to it, let alone have sex with them. It is this relevant and timely principle, rather than its historical status, that makes Dreamsnake demand to be read today.