Dreamsnake is a 1978 science fiction novel by American writer Vonda N. McIntyre. It is an expansion of her Nebula Award–winning 1973 novelette "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand". The main character, Snake, is a healer who uses genetically modified serpents to cure sickness in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust on Earth. The titular "dreamsnake" is an alien serpent whose venom gives dying people pleasant dreams. The novel follows Snake as she seeks to replace her dead dreamsnake. The book is an example of second-wave feminism in science fiction. McIntyre subverted gendered narratives, including by placing a woman at the center of a heroic quest. Dreamsnake also explored social structures and sexuality from a feminist perspective, and examined themes of healing and cross-cultural interaction. The novel won the 1978 Nebula Award, the 1979 Hugo Award, and the 1979 Locus Poll Award. Snake's strength and self-sufficiency were noted by commentators, while McIntyre's writing and the book's themes also received praise.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamsnake

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1865:

Actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth fatally shot U.S. president Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Abraham_Lincoln

1909:

Following a reactionary military revolt against the Committee of Union and Progress, a mob began a massacre of Armenian Christians in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adana_massacre

1967:

After leading a military coup three months earlier, Gnassingbé Eyadéma installed himself as President of Togo, a post that he held until 2005. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnassingb%C3%A9_Eyad%C3%A9ma

2014:

Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from a government secondary school in the town of Chibok, Nigeria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

enfeoff: 1. (transitive, chiefly law, historical) To transfer a fief to, to endow with a fief; to put (a person) in legal possession of a freehold interest. 2. (transitive, figuratively) To give up completely; to surrender, to yield. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enfeoff

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.   --James Branch Cabell https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell