flexagon | Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre

This one's for

miyyu, because I actually do write book reviews. I usually just don't post them to LJ.

Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre crossed my desk because

norwoodbridge and I were trying (between us) to read all the novels that had won both the Nebula and the Hugo. It was good, and I'm going to tell you why.

First, it was science fiction, despite the "healer with a magic snake" setup. I'm not sure if it was set on Earth, but it may have been (there weren't any giveaways, either way, on the order of "the second moon was just rising"). It is definitely post-nuclear-war, with wastelands of radioactive craters. Most people live in a pretty low-tech way, enabling some fantasy tropes to occur, but with some high tech remaining around genetics and biotech and vaccines; it is from this small, high-tech subculture that our heroine, a healer, comes. Also, biofeedback is common and is used by everyone (at least in the mountain cultures) for birth control and maybe also menses control for women. Lastly, there's one super high-tech city, with videoconferencing and firmly closed-up walls, that is in touch with "offworlders" for its own mysterious reasons.

Kickass female main character often felt small and grubby; was very human, yet also persistent and brave. Convincingly feminine, as well as being ethically non-monogamous; realistically sexual without coming across as indiscriminate. (This characteristic holds for the book itself, also -- the MC's main sex scene in the book ends up serving a major plot point.) She adopts a child during the course of the book, and this feels natural and organic, very real.

Gender stereotype busting. Main character and a man kind of fall in love at the beginning of the book, but are separated by their duties and life choices; as they wait to re-unite, he passes up the chance to have casually friendly sex and she does not, though they both think of each other at these times. Near the end of the book, when MC is trapped in a bad situation for a while and the love interest is catching up, he doesn't rescue her -- she rescues herself. (Sweet!) He finds her as she's stumbling tiredly toward her camp, 90% out of danger but still in need of some serious snuggles.

Poly-friendly. A romantically fully-involved triad requests the main character's help early in the book, as one of their party is badly injured. This is not commented on as either usual or unusual, merely taken in stride.

Not an overly tidy world. This is a "slice of life" book, not an "understand everything" book. The dreamsnakes are like magic because they are alien. There are "offworlders" in contact with the city. The city has different ideas about biotech than the out-of-city healers do. There are alien domes dotted around (one of them broken open) which hold alien biomes, and plants spill out from these and coexist with the local plants. We never find out much about these things; they're part of the backdrop of the world for MC, and therefore for us readers too. I might guess that panic over the alien contact is what triggered the nuclear war... but who knows.

Not an overly tidy plot. There are two main plot arcs. One is "The dreamsnake is dead, MC must get another dreamsnake so that she can be a healer" and the other one is the love story. These two both end reasonably neatly, but the path to each one is not straight. MC's first attempt to get a new dreamsnake, which takes considerable time, essentially comes to naught. The love story is interrupted by other options and possibilities for both MC and the love interest. There's the whole child-adoption arc, which fits into neither initial setup. It feels a bit Japanese, or... a bit like real life.