Healer Snake travels the land, visiting villages and nomadic tribes of desert and mountain, bringing the gifts of her training
as well as those offered by her three special serpents: the albino cobra Mist, the coppery rattlesnake Sand, and the green
dreamsnake Grass. Mist and Sand have been genetically engineered to produce curatives and even vaccines in their venom glands,
but Grass is a special species, a serpent from another world whose bite brings peace and pleasant dreams - mostly used to ease
the final hours of the terminally ill. Snake's decision to push into territories not often visited by healers comes at an
unexpected cost: while healing one nomadic herder boy, she tragically misreads the local customs and the deeply-ingrained fear of
the local deadly sand vipers, and his family ends up killing Grass. This is a blow not just to Snake but to the healers as a
whole: nobody has ever gotten dreamsnakes to breed in captivity on Earth, and the one city where offworlders trade has shut their
doors in the faces of healers for decades, choking off the supply. Without dreamsnakes, a healer cannot effectively practice
their arts, so their numbers are dwindling with the supply of surviving serpents. But while on her way back to the healers'
station to explain the loss (and, likely as not, be exiled for her failure), a chance encounter offers a thread of hope for
redemption. Thus begins Snake's long, dangerous journey across the lands to find a new dreamsnake.
Review
This classic novel, first published in 1978 (though the short story it was based on was published in 1973, famously the result
of a "two random words" prompt challenge at a writing conference), won multiple awards and remains quite readable and interesting
today, with a great concept in its bio-engineered medicinal snakes.
Set on an Earth made nearly unrecognizable several generations after nuclear war almost ended humanity, it doesn't overlabor the
setting or backstory, letting the tale unfold with intriguing hints about the civilization that rebuilt itself upon radioactive
ashes from parts old and new, familiar and alien: while some have reverted to tribal existence, the healers practice gene splicing
and other advanced tech (though they have to grind their own microscope lenses and such without a global manufacturing
infrastructure), and pretty much everyone, even in the most remote places, practices some form of bio-control over their own
reproductive processes. Only in the city of Center does anything like what we would recognize as modern urban culture remain
ubiquitous, and they've become strange and secretive and increasingly paranoid about outside contact. Still, this is not a world
that's mired in doom and despair and superstition, but one where people strive to rise to the challenge of creating a new and
better future, if in a piecemeal fashion. One of the things this world has mostly cast off is old gender baggage; relationships
are more likely to be multi-person partnerships than male-dominated pairings, nonbinary inclinations are no longer taboo, and no
roles seem to be closed or open exclusively to boys or girls. Snake's journey is one that other authors might have given to a male
lead, or would've made the fact that she's a woman into a major plot point (where she faces opposition and friction just because
of her gender). Even today it sometimes seem like there has to be a justification for a female lead, whereas here Snake's
sexuality and gender are just part of who she is. Along the way, she picks up an unlikely companion, as well as an unknown stalker
who proves pivotal in the last leg of the book. She also, unbeknownst to her, picks up a love interest who decides to follow her
into the unknown, a young man from the desert tribe where Grass was killed, who has his own, if lesser, adventure tracking down
the wandering healer.
The plot moves pretty well, if hardly at a breakneck pace, weaving in some pretty interesting worldbuilding with the action. Some
parts toward the end feel mildly forced and the conclusion struck me as a little rushed or off-kilter for reasons I'm not sure I
can put my finger on, though on the whole things wrap up reasonably well.
Marie-Josèphe de la Croix and her brother, Yves, have come a long way from their childhood in seventeenth-century
colonial Martinique. Now, Marie-Josèphe is a lady-in-waiting to a prominent courtier in King Louis XIV's entourage
at Versailles, while Yves - now a Jesuit priest and natural philosopher - has just returned from a momentous expedition
with a living sea monster. Sea monsters, grotesque and roughly humanoid creatures, were once more numerous on the waves,
and legend claims that eating their flesh confers immortality, but it must come from a fresh kill. Until the feast, the
monster is to be kept in the Fountain of Apollo on the grounds of Versailles, while Yves dissects its mate for the
edification of his discipline and for the pleasure of the king. As always, Marie-Josèphe is to act as his assistant,
sketching Yves's findings and feeding the captive beast... but something about the living creature tugs at her. When she
begins to discern images and ideas from its haunting songs, she questions everything she thought she knew about the beasts,
about her own life, even about the infallibility of the king and the church's teachings.
Review
First off, there's a little backstory with this particular book selection. My late father, a lifelong sci-fi fan, knew
Vonda McIntyre from local fandom. When Dad was beginning his slide into dementia, the last book he wanted was this title,
the last novel she published before her death, but it was very difficult to locate. It took a few years, during which Dad
(as is the nature of dementia) further declined, but I finally managed to secure a hardcover copy for Xmas. Even though he
could no longer read much, he was very happy to receive it. Toward the end of his life, when he could only manage to follow
short audiobooks, I decided that I was going to read The Moon and the Sun in his honor... but life with a person
in late-stage dementia is not conducive to deep, long stretches of reading, unfortunately, so my first attempts were set
aside.
Almost one year after my father passed away, I have finally finished reading the book. I consider it a personal victory,
even though, as it turns out, this book is not particularly my preferred cup of cocoa.
Set in an alternate-history France where the Sun King reigns supreme over all enemies foreign and domestic, The Moon
and the Sun spares few words painting the extravagance and intricacies of courtly life in Versailles, from the
sprawling palatial grounds to the complicated dance of courtly manners (barely masking the vicious backstabbing) to the
wildly impractical fashions and amusements of the uppermost of the upper crust. The characters are firmly rooted in their
class and time, with the church's teachings dominating both their understanding of nature and the social norms and
hierarchy bent entirely toward the glorification and satisfaction of the king. This is both an interesting detail and an
occasional source of frustration, as the mindsets of that class and time are very rigid things that take quite a lot of
battering to even begin to flex slightly - and this is a story that cannot truly begin to move until that flex occurs.
McIntyre also preserves many of the naming conventions, inserting real-life figures (which I'm far too ignorant of French
history to recognize, let alone appreciate), so right out of the gate I found myself bombarded with a string of names and
titles and ranks and people who blurred together on the page, their relationships - so vital to the intricate balance of
courtly hierarchy - an absolute jumble in my head. I eventually had to resort to switching to an audiobook version
(courtesy of Libby and my local library system); it was just plain easier to pick out the important characters with a
narrator as intermediary than it was to try sorting out so many similar-scanning names. (And I'm a person who loves a
nice, thick epic fantasy with a large cast; it was the similarity, not the number, of players that kept tripping me up,
and the lack of time and space to properly establish them in my head before five or ten more characters barged into the
narrative.)
In any event, the story mostly follows Marie-Josèphe, an exceptionally sheltered young woman of minor noble birth
whose intellectual passions and gifts put her at odds with societal expectations. Though every bit her brother's equal
(and occasional superior) in intellect and inquisitiveness, he is encouraged to pursue his studies - within the narrow
scope of thinking allowed by the pope, at least - while she has been repeatedly and harshly chastised for "unwomanly"
behavior to the point where she self-censures her own thoughts more often than not. While Yves was away making a name for
himself as a natural philosopher and gaining the patronage of King Louis, she was shunted off to a convent where she was
forced into silence and punished for her musical compositions and studying advanced mathematics (which the nuns
considered a form of spellcraft, burning her notes and correspondences). Comparatively, life at Versailles, confined as
it is in so many ways, is the embodiment of pure liberty. She tries to become the ideal noblewoman, and is very happy to
have risen as far as lady-in-waiting to a high-ranked family (the daughter of the king's legitimate brother and his
German-born princess wife), but still yearns toward the forbidden fruits of intellectual curiosity. Yves, once her
partner and champion when they were children on Martinique, has grown into someone she hardly recognizes after their
years apart, far more willing to stick her in the prison society has built for highborn women (or in the veil of a nun,
which he considers a perfectly acceptable solution that would also keep her free of immoral temptations of the flesh,
not caring how the nuns of Martinique were even worse than high society when it came to proscribing a woman's thoughts
and roles); he even seems reluctant to accept her help in the study of the sea monsters, for all that they were always
partners in his studies back on Martinique. It takes a long, long time for the presence of the sea monster to begin to
wear through the thick shell Marie-Josèphe has built around herself and recognize that she's dealing with a
person, not a mere animal... which raises a dire implication: if sea monsters are not mere beasts - placed in the world
by God for the use of Man, as the church teachers her - but people with souls, then King Louis would be committing a
mortal sin to consume their flesh in the pursuit of his own immortality. But how is she to convince anyone, when she's
the only one who seems to understand Sherzad's songs and the images they weave? Even her own brother doesn't want to
believe her, as not only would doing so defy his Biblical understanding of the world, but it would threaten King Louis's
patronage of his studies. The matter is further complicated with the arrival of Pope Innocent at Versailles, in a
long-awaited reconciliation between Rome and France that will create a world-spanning superpower to crush Protestant and
heathen dissent; the pope already is angered by the liberal attitudes of many in the king's court, where they let mere
women assist in ungodly pursuits and indulge sinful ideas, and isn't at all likely to reconsider the church's previous
findings that allowed that sea monsters were not actual demons but simply natural beasts.
The whole tale is rather ponderous as it slowly takes shape, and even when it moves it tends to plod and loop and
backtrack as Marie-Josèphe questions her own observations and conclusions and runs into a near-impenetrable wall
of skepticism on all fronts, all of which meander through the sumptuously detailed days and nights of courtly life and
the power struggles among the nobility over who can most please the Sun King on his gilded and bejeweled throne.
Victories are often cut short and crushed into agonizing defeats, as those with the greatest power to enact change
invariably prove obstinately, even violently, opposed to doing so. The ending manages to be somewhat satisfactory,
though I have to wonder if McIntyre intended to write more; there is "sequel potential", as the saying goes, in how
things end. With that said, I'm not sure I would have read another book if it had existed. For all that I appreciated
the deep research and faithfully reproduced details of not only the physical but the mental setting, and while there
were some very imaginative ideas that were ultimately explored, I ultimately didn't find the world or that characters
that pleasant to be around.
As a closing note... this one was for you, Dad. You weren't a drinker (save of root beer), so pouring one out for you
seems inappropriate. Consider this me lifting one up - a book - in your memory.
