Dreamsnake

Dreamsnake is a science fiction novel by the American writer Vonda N. McIntyre, published in 1978. It grew out of a novelette, Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand, which had won her a Nebula Award in 1974, and it went on to take the Nebula, the Hugo and the Locus poll in 1979.

The Earth of the book is thinly inhabited and low in technology, a generation or more after a nuclear war. Medical care belongs to healers who work from settlement to settlement with genetically altered snakes: a cobra, a rattlesnake and, for the terminally ill, a dreamsnake whose venom gives the patient a peaceful death. Snake is a young woman who has just completed her training.

Her rounds take her to a village where her companions are not understood, and one of them is killed. Because a dreamsnake is rare and cannot easily be replaced, she has to travel a long way beyond her own territory to look for another, which brings her into contact with communities organised very differently from the one she trained in.