Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake won a bunch of awards when it was published, but I don't see why. Dreamsnake is an expansion of McIntyre's award-winning short story, "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," which is a decent story in its own right but which hardly has enough material to fill an entire novel.

Dreamsnake is the story of Snake, a healer in a post-apocalyptic Earth in which genetically engineered snakes serve as the hypodermic needles of the future. In the first chapter Snake loses her dreamsnake, an alien creature whose venom acts as a hallucinogen on humans. Because the dreamsnake is vital for a healer to function, Snake embarks on a quest to either find another dreamsnake (though few of them exist outside of the healers' compound) or else return to her hometown and admit defeat.

McIntyre writes well enough, but her dialogue veers too often toward the melodramatic ("O Snake! You cannot leave me!" etc.). More importantly, her descriptions of this far-future post-apocalyptic Earth are too thin, leading to an uninspiring setting for a mostly dull story. That's not to say it's all boring: the idea of using snakes as hypodermic needles is interesting, as are the brief hints that McIntyre drops about the City, off-world humans, and extraterrestrial beings (not the least of which are the dreamsnakes themselves). But for some reason it's just not enough to satisfy the appetites of even the most desperate science-fiction fan.

Dreamsnake is not one of those gut-wrenchingly bad books that make you want to hunt down the author for wasting your time--but even the short time and slight effort it takes to plow through it are hardly worth it.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu