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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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