[Comments] Vonda N. McIntyre Month

[ptwiddle]

Making good headway through Dreamsnake. A few first impressions.

 

I feel like sci-fi/fantasy novels often have hypercompetent protagonists, and this fits in, but what strikes me most is not Snake's competence as a physical healer but as an emotional one: she's extremely attuned to the emotions of everyone she meets. With both the Jesse/Merideth/Alex and Gabriel/Mayor episodes it felt to me that there was more drama in managing the emotions of her patients and those around her than there was in the medical treatment. The empathy and understanding she has for everyone (including herself) are amazing; it felt like a great therapy session at times.

Arevin and the clan leader's conversation has some of the tuned in therapist feel to some degree, too, and Grum. Given all the emotional intelligence, wholesome support, default respect characters have, the world feels almost utopian, rather than the dystopia we might expect from a post-apocalypse setting.

Also got this utopian vibe a bit with the attitude taken toward Ao and the scavengers -- a very ecosystem-y "everyone has a role to play and should be respected for it".

[Optional Reality]

Originally Posted by ptwiddle

Making good headway through Dreamsnake. A few first impressions.

 

I feel like sci-fi/fantasy novels often have hypercompetent protagonists, and this fits in, but what strikes me most is not Snake's competence as a physical healer but as an emotional one: she's extremely attuned to the emotions of everyone she meets. With both the Jesse/Merideth/Alex and Gabriel/Mayor episodes it felt to me that there was more drama in managing the emotions of her patients and those around her than there was in the medical treatment. The empathy and understanding she has for everyone (including herself) are amazing; it felt like a great therapy session at times.

Arevin and the clan leader's conversation has some of the tuned in therapist feel to some degree, too, and Grum. Given all the emotional intelligence, wholesome support, default respect characters have, the world feels almost utopian, rather than the dystopia we might expect from a post-apocalypse setting.

Also got this utopian vibe a bit with the attitude taken toward Ao and the scavengers -- a very ecosystem-y "everyone has a role to play and should be respected for it".

 

I broadly agree. I think some of this was directly intended, because in a lot of ways I really do read Dreamsnake as a reversal of the traditional hero's journey, which values (typically male) strength and decisive physical action. Here, "strength" is emotional-social. Snake is a good physical healer because she is a good or even hyper-competent emotional healer.

I have some problems with what that implies to a modern reader, but it was surely revolutionary at the time.

[Fillyjonk]

You are both correct. This was deliberate— a call out for the idea that equality meant WOMEN MUST BE LIKE MEN, interesting pushback—It was revolutionary on two levels.

[Optional Reality]

I'm trying to think of a good third-wave feminist sci-fi alternative to highlight the difference between "women are different from men" and "women are however women are". Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga is good, but there's a lot there. I guess you start at the beginning with Shards of Honor.

[bothers]

Also making good headway through Dreamsnake.

 

I didn't read the blurb before starting this, so I went ALL IN with no expectations beyond snakes.

I was... surprised and honestly quite pleased to find that this is a book in large part about disability and lookism. A lot of thought-provoking stuff here. My day job is centered around the challenges faced by people who have disabilities, and my work necessarily touches on other aspects of marginalisation as they intersect with the disabled experience (e.g. gender biases, lookism, poverty, trauma, mental health issues, etc). When you work in my industry, the professional can't help but become personal --and political!-- so all of this is very close to my heart.

I wonder if she has personal experience of acquired disability, as it comes up a few times (I'm just beginning chapter 8). Not just Jesse, but also the way the Mayor tries to pretend what's happening to him isn't happening, or tries to force himself out of bed instead of recuperating because he doesn't have the time for a disability. Like... who does? When I acquired a life-changing disability I did exactly the same thing. And I can see McIntyre kind of returning to this narrative over and over from different directions. It's very good.

[Fillyjonk]

bothers, there is a weird convergence. I see a TRAIT in Tumble, Durza, and Snake in my head---they are very different, and yet they have this one thing in common. When you get to the end, I think you will see what that is--and I want to talk about it then!

On a separate note, as to your point above, I want to share a quote about THE EXILE WAITING (and its companion book, DREAMSNAKE) from Dr. Nicola Griffith:

 

Written in the early 70s, it largely anticipates the later theoretical work of disability studies. I can see ways to argue that without this novel, and its companion novel, Dreamsnake, then the accompanying wave of work by Le Guin, Russ, Charnas, and Butler, there could have been no cyberpunk. (There again, as Una McCormack points out in her afterword, Samuel R Delany has already done that.)* But part of that story begins with this book.

[bothers]

Originally Posted by Fillyjonk

bothers, there is a weird convergence. I see a TRAIT in Tumble, Durza, and Snake in my head---they are very different, and yet they have this one thing in common. When you get to the end, I think you will see what that is--and I want to talk about it then!

I don't see it!! I mean, Durza and Tumble both had/have Random Medicine Skill Proficiency (as does Crash, number 4 on this list, and I swear I was not going for a theme with all these characters ), but that's not a trait, per se. What is it?!

Originally Posted by Fillyjonk

On a separate note, as to your point above, I want to share a quote about THE EXILE WAITING (and its companion book, DREAMSNAKE) from Dr. Nicola Griffith:

 

Written in the early 70s, it largely anticipates the later theoretical work of disability studies. I can see ways to argue that without this novel, and its companion novel, Dreamsnake, then the accompanying wave of work by Le Guin, Russ, Charnas, and Butler, there could have been no cyberpunk. (There again, as Una McCormack points out in her afterword, Samuel R Delany has already done that.)* But part of that story begins with this book.

 

Yeah, that's a great quote. Maybe I'll read The Exile Waiting next!

Looking up when Dreamsnake was published, I see it came out five years after the US Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was written into law. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed and introduced the idea of protected classes, disabled people weren't included as one of the groups that was considered worth protecting from discrimination. So the Rehab Act included clauses to sneak some civil rights protection in for disabled people too, and it was supported by disability organisations and pressure groups like Disabled In Action who did some truly incredible protest work around that time. If anyone is interested, I can recommend Judy Heumann's memoir Being Heumann, it covers the cauldron of protest that was happening at the time.

But all of this is to say that the disability rights movement already existed when McIntyre wrote this stuff, and I wonder how much influence it had on her, because sometimes I think "yeah, she gets it"... and then we get to North. I see what Optional Reality means here, and I agree - it's hard to know what I make of it.

She puts in so much work to deal with the lookism experienced by Melissa, only to throw it all out the window as soon as we meet North, who is literally the trope of the deformed villain. It's disappointing. It's worse still that North's albinism is made into a whole thing when Mist the cobra also has albinism, and I just can't see why it should be notable to Snake.

On the other hand, Snake is basically a post-apoc space doctor, and it does seem realistic to me that she would lean hard into the medical model of disability, and see North as a collection of pathologies first, and a person second. Melissa is a bit different because her scarring is just cosmetic, whereas North's gigantism is going to cause a cascade of health problems that could theoretically have been fixed. The split between the medical model of disability and the social model was well understood by disability rights activists at the time McIntyre was writing, and I really want to believe that she was trying to say something about the expression of the medical model ideology. But she also did the deformed, disabled villain trope, without subversion or irony, and that makes me feel like maybe I'm giving her a little bit too much credit, and that perhaps she herself was still bound to medical model thinking in spite of her evident empathy and thoughtfulness.

Anyway, I thought it was a great book! I can really see how it would have helped to lay the groundwork for cyberpunk (a genre that I love with my soul that is itself deeply problematic with regards to how it handles disability). I read on McIntyre's Wikipedia page that she was a biologist, and phew, you can tell. Genetic manipulation?! Baroque descriptions of alien fauna that tie into entire alien ecosystems?!! It's fabulous stuff.

[Fillyjonk]

 

In DND terms... all three of them are people who will put themselves into dangerous situations for their VERY different ideals (and here for Durza ideals = her batcrap band members), but don't look to combat as the first, second, or even third solution.

[bothers]

 

Oh gosh yes, of course. I didn't even recognise that because it jsut seems so normal to me!

Back in the days when I had a DVD collection, it was neatly organised into two broad categories of "stuff I bought for myself" and "stuff other people bought for me because they figured I'd enjoy it". And I did enjoy the latter category, to be clear! But the overarching difference between the two groups was that the stuff other people gave me was always filled with bright flashing shooty bangs and punch-ups and baddies getting roasted with flamethrowers, and the stuff I bought for myself pretty much never had anything like that in it at all.

Narratively speaking, when you do away with combat as the first option, you start to open up wider avenues of potential action. I noticed in Dreamsnake that Snake's knife was mentioned a few times in the story, but she never once actually used it for anything. It became a sort of symbol of the typical macho adventurer tool that was constantly held back or forgotten about or thwarted and so Snake had to use other, more complex ways of achieving her goals. Even when she euthanises the two dreamsnakes, she does it with her teeth. She uses her own body instead of the more traditional (dare I say phallic) external weapon.

[lostcheerio]

I will be finished today and open up all these spoilers!!

[bothers]

We don't have a book for June yet, do we?

[lostcheerio]

No, we don't yet. Sprite had some ideas -- Sprite do you want to pick?

If not Sprite, anyone else have a good idea?

[Lemming23]

I still want to read Dreamsnake, but haven't gotten to it yet (been a busy month), so that'll be my June read, as well as whatever else we pick.

[Sprite]

I ended up re-reading Dreamsnake since it took longer than expected for my print copy of THE EXILE WAITING to arrive, (I started listening to the EXILE audio book but could not stand the narrator). So I'll be reading that. But I generally read/listen to more than one book at a time.

I had suggested SPEAR by Nicola Griffith. I've just finished listening to the audiobook, and it is simply wonderful. It's a take on the Arthurian legend, and the main character is a version of Percival. Nicola narrates the audiobook herself.

Another suggestion that Fillyjonk and I both made was something by T. Kingfisher. I have really enjoyed her Temple of the White Rat series set in a very D&D-like world.

[Lemming23]

T Kingfisher does tend to be good, I'd happily read another of hers.