OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

By: Sara Ryan
April 10, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

DREAMSNAKE | VONDA N. McINTYRE | 1978

I wish I’d read Dreamsnake as a teen.

I know I’d have — aspirationally — identified with protagonist Snake, who’s strong, smart, compassionate, competent, and curious. Snake uses snakes to provide medicine, vaccines, and pleasurable anesthesia — the “dream” part of dreamsnake — to her patients.

I’d like to think I’d also have absorbed McIntyre’s matter-of-fact cultural worldbuilding: people can have more than one romantic partner; the leader of a clan can be a woman; sex can be an act of hospitality initiated by asking “is there anything I can do for you?” The cultures she creates are certainly not utopian, but cruelty and thoughtlessness coexist with kindness and consideration.

I’m not sure that teen me, who was typically more interested in character relationships than setting details, would have noted how deftly McIntyre gives equal weight to the physical effects of nuclear war on the landscape and the lingering psychological effects on the survivors, many generations on. But I might have appreciated at least some of her gorgeous descriptions: “Snake looked back over the desert. A thin haze of dust obscured the horizon, but the nearer black sand dunes lay in rolling opalescence before her, flashing back the reddened sunlight. Heat waves gave the illusion of movement. Once one of Snake’s teachers had described the ocean to her, and this was what she imagined it to look like.”

Teen me was learning about cultural differences, and I hope I’d have paid attention to how Snake learns about them, too: “She was getting used to the differences that made politeness in one place an offense somewhere else.”

And I was learning about how places that are pleasant, even luxurious, can nevertheless be terrible to spend time in — I’d have starred this passage: “She was as comfortable as she had ever been, even back home in the healers’ station. Yet the residence was an unpleasant place in which to live: familiarity with it brought a clearer perception of the emotional strains between the people. There was too much building and not enough family; too much power and no protection against it.”

Protection — how to provide it, the consequences when it fails, and what its limits are — is a theme throughout the book. Teen me, craving independence and agency, might have angrily quoted this line at my parents: “It’s impossible to protect anyone completely without enslaving them.”

Ultimately, I think Dreamsnake might’ve helped to inoculate teen me, like a snake-derived vaccine, against the more reactionary messaging I was receiving from other sources. But since I wasn’t fortunate enough to read it then, discovering it now — and being inspired to seek out more of McIntyre’s work as a result — is the next best thing.

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OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

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