(read but not reviewed)
The living sea monster, with its double tail, tangled hair, and gargoyle face, provides an intriguing experiment for Yves and the king. Yet for Marie-Josèphe, the creature’s gaze and exquisite singing foretell a different future…
Soon Marie-Josèphe is contemplating choices that defy the institutions which power her world. Somehow, she must find the courage to follow her heart and her convictions—even at the cost of changing her life forever.
Snake is a healer in a post-apocalypse world. She has that name because of her three serpents, genetically modified to produce medicines and vaccines. Early on, she loses Grass, her Dreamsnake, due to a tragic misunderstanding. Dreamsnakes are alien creatures, and in desperately short supply, and Snake can't continue to be a full healer without one. So the rest of the book follows her attempts to solve this problem.
The first chapter, where Snake loses Grass, is the much-anthologised short story "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand". That short story is very good, but the novel is even better. We get to see more of the varied post-apocalyptic world as Snake travels through it. Snake is a great protagonist -- it would have been easy to make her a super-competent saint, but instead she feels solidly real: competent in her profession, caring in a pragmatic way, but also often tired, dirty, depressed, angry, or scared. The minor characters are equally well-drawn and distinguishable. And the background world, with its strange mix of low and high-tech, and different cultures, feels like a real world, not just a hotchpotch of scenes for Snake to travel through.
[One feature of the book I never noticed until a discussion on the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written concerns the character Meredith. When I first read the book, I assumed Meredith to be male, because I think of Meredith as a male name. However, I discovered that Meredith can also be a female name. And there are no gender references to Meredith at all. It is a fascinating exercise to read assuming one gender, then re-read assuming the other.]
All too often a travel story can seem episodic; the protagonist travels from scene to scene, and the past scenes seem to evaporate from the world. Here, however, there is a second parallel strand to the story, which manages to link the scenes together cleverly, so that you see a place continuing to exist after Snake has left it. This technique helps to make the world feel real.
Dreamsnake is one of the books I periodically re-read; it is also one I dearly wish I could read again for the first time.
-- Gary Farber, rec.arts.sf.written, 1999
