This book is part of the following of my reading list projects:

* Nebula 'Best Novel' Winners [1978]
* Hugo 'Best Novel' Winners [1979]

TBR...

There are many SF novels that take place in a post-holocaust world. This one of the more interesting I have read. The nature of the holocaust is never clearly defined, though there is still lingering radioactivity, neither is the state of things before, although a number of tantalising aspects are mentioned at time.

Humanity, in this world, has been reduced for the most part to a hunter-gatherer existence, although one or two pockets of high/bio-tech still exist. Amongst these are the healers who use bio-engineered snakes as portable drugs factories/hyposermic syringes. They also use dreamsnake, exterrestrial reptile of unknown origin who venom is used 'smooth the path between death and life'. This is the story of Snake, a healer whose dreamsnake is killed and who must then seek another one.

Although, in my opinion, the novel is perhaps a bit slow to establish itself (it didn't start to grip me until the third chapter), it is the characterisation that really makes it a fine story, proving that SF doesn't have to be all 'rockets and robots'. Highly recommended.

RELEASE NOTES:

I brought this book back from the UK Unconvention this weekend.

"Dreamsnake" is based on the short story "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand", which I read a long time before I first read this novel.

In a post-apocalyptic age, although the world has regressed to an earlier technological stage than now, some forms of biotech have advanced. Children are taught techniques to control their fertility, and healers travel the lands with snakes which have been genetically altered to produce medicines.

Snake is a newly-qualified healer making her first long healing trip and when one of her three snakes is killed it is a disaster, since without a dreamsnake she can no longer be a healer. Although the cobras and rattlesnakes used by the healers are common, dreamsnakes are very rare and the healers are only occasionally successful in breeding them, so it is unlikely that she would be given a replacement. So Snake sets out on a quest to catch herself a new dreamsnake, for there are rumours of a place where they live in great numbers.

A good book which won the Nebula Award in 1978.

RELEASE NOTES:

To be released at Saturday's Nottingham BookCrossing meet.

If no-one takes it, I'll leave it on the bookshelves.

This will do for the 2006 "You're Such an Animal" release challenge.

RELEASE NOTES:

Left on top of the black box near the Florists at the top of the street.