Vonda N. McIntyre
1978
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ - -
SPOILER ALERT
Yes, the cover of this book's 1986 mass-market paperback edition makes
it look like it’s going to be one of those super-goofy magical fantasy
novels. But it’s really quite good.
It takes place on a post-nuclear-war Earth (always a good start). Nobody
remembers what society was like before the war – or even that there was
a war. They are all living either in small towns or as nomads in the
countryside. All overt modern science and technology has been lost.
Or – that is what it appears at first. It turns out that some science
does remain, although it is not very well understood, even by its
practitioners.
For example, the main character, Snake, is a healer. She has a set of
venomous snakes that she uses to cure people. At first it seems like
random ritual but it turns out that the snake venom actually is an
antibiotic and that the training the healer received was essentially
first aid and basic nursing – so there is a reason why it really does
work.
At the beginning of the story her key medicinal snake, the Dreamsnake,
accidentally gets killed by scared townspeople and Snake has to go on a
long journey to find another one. Along the way she also happens to be
able to get the people of the towns and the people in the countryside to
stop being prejudiced against each other. It is an okay road trip
story; the characters Snake meets up with are mostly interesting and the
locations are good. I especially liked reading about how the land is
spotted with giant pits—which everyone avoids—that you gradually realize
are nuclear bomb craters still full of radioactivity.
But
I definitely thought the best part of this book was the way McIntyre
presented an apparently undeveloped, backwards world and then gradually
allowed you to see how science lay under the superstition. Like A Canticle for Leibowitz, it was a good
take on how knowledge might survive but be transformed after the
sophisticated structure around it is lost.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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