Books like Dreamsnake

While this book gets docked a point or two for the cheesy 70s cover and the title, it deserves a place among the classics of the genre. I first read the Nebula-winning novella "Of Mist, And Grass, And Sand," in middle school, but I never realized that McIntyre had expanded it to novel length. It's a thoughtful adventure, a quest led by a mature and confident heroine, Snake. I love her as a character: she knows who she is, she is good at what she does, and she is comfortable in her own skin. I also love that this book is not your typical post-apocalyptic nightmare. It takes place so long after a nuclear catastrophe that society has rebuilt itself, albeit in a very different form. This lets McIntyre present us with a familiar but somewhat alien landscape, advanced and regressive technology, humans acting human but according to slightly different societal rules, all with lots of room to explore. While there are a couple of elements that seem as dated as the cover, all in all I thought McIntyre did a beautiful job of expanding that original story into the larger tale told here.