Dreamsnake

They summon and she travels: Snake, the healer. Through the blasted landscape of a post-holocaust world, she carries her three serpents. From the venom of two, she distills her medicines; but it is the third, the alien dreamsnake--whose bite can ease the fear and pain of death--that is the most valued. When the dreamsnake is killed by those she has come to help, her powers as a healer are all but lost. Her only hope now lies in the treacherous journey to far-off Center City, where Snake will be pursued by two implacable followers: one driven mad by love, the other by fear and need.

Vonda Neel McIntyre, US writer and geneticist, is one of the earliest successful graduates of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, which she attended in 1970. She began to publish science fiction with "Only at Night" in Clarion (1971 anthology), and gained prominence with "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" (1973) which won a Nebula for Best Novelette and served as the initial section of Dreamsnake (1978), which won both a Nebula and a Hugo award.

She has been on the New York Times bestseller list five times, most recently for her novel STAR WARS: The Crystal Star. She has penned stories for the Star Trek enterprise as well, both in paperback novels and films, contributing to Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan; Star Trek III: The Search for Spock; and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. There are more than four million copies of her books in print. Ms. McIntyre lives in Seattle