Science fiction author Vonda N. Mcintyre has been progressively releasing electronic copies of her books for free in serialised form via the Book View Cafe site, where you can also buy electronic versions of the books.
The author is perhaps best known for her beloved 1978 novel Dreamsnake, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, but she has also written others, including Superluminal (1983) and The Moon and the Sun (1997), both of which are available on Book View Cafe. The site allows readers access to one chapter per week for free.
The author, who has a Twitter account at @vondanmcintyre, has also conducted a new interview recently over at SF Signal, in which she discusses the origins of the Dreamsnake title. Originally, McIntyre wrote, her publishers thought the name would cause people afraid of snakes to avoid the book. Until an intervention:
So finally I wrote my editor (who I adored, and who had been doing her best to ride interference for me at the publisher) in despair and said something on the order of, “I can’t think of another title. Ursula Le Guin thinks it ought to be called Dreamsnake.” And everybody shut up like a box and lo! the title was Dreamsnake.
Commentary
I haven’t read the rest of McIntyre’s books, but Dreamsnake is great science fiction classic and anyone who hasn’t read it immediately should pick it up. The book is an entrancing tale of a healer in what I remember to be a post-apocalyptic world. Several of her healing techniques utilise tame snakes.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
Subscribe
