Any with good snakes?
I think that one of the protagonist’s magical pets in Mercedes Lackey’s The Serpent’s Shadow was a snake, but am not sure. In general though it’s harder to make them heroes; even without the cultural baggage, they don’t have hands. They aren’t really equipped to do much constructive.
Verdi is a snake.
I’ve got my kids working on whether they can remember anything where the reptiles, especially snakes, are the good guys.
Really? I hear there’s good eating on those things.
I forgot Patricia C. Wrede.
The dragons are good guys in her Enchanted Forest series.
In the same vein, as these novels and Enemy Mine, Alan Dean Foster also wrote the novelization of the movie The Last Starfighter. In the book and movie, Grig is a reptillian character that is mentor, General, and teacher.
In The Face in the Abyss, one of the great lost-world novels by A. Merritt, the leader of the good guys is the “Snake Mother”, a sort of half-woman/half-snake person.
I know it sounds corny and pulp… you can laugh, but I believe that The Last Starfighter is a seminal media (film, playright, author and ghost writer). It’s pretty much the psyche and worldview of 3/4 of the subscribers here, into this 21st Century… Gamers. To quote Nena, “Everyone’s a Captain Kirk.”
The protagonist is Saa, a lizard man from beneath the earth. The story also has lizard baddies.
Scholastic book from 1967. I loved this as a kid and am regretful that I had lent it to a friend in grade 7 and did not get it back. I’ve not seen the book since and have lost contact with him. It is out of print but may be available from your local library.
Kaa, from Kipling’s Jungle Books, might count, though he wasn’t unambiguously a good guy.
Some of the later books in the Valdemar novels by Mercedes Lackey include as secondary characters the reptilian hertasi. Who are decent, if often shy.
They weren’t evil, just imperialistic, and saw it as the natural order of things that humanity be brought into the fold of the empire(And also, quite frankly, saw it as for our own good.. they had had a stable empire for millenia). The humans, of course, considered them evil, but right from the start its demonstrated by the lizard characters that they are anything but evil.
The Bug Warsby Robert Asprin is told from the point of view of a reptillian soldier. There’s no talk about good or bad. Only that the soldier does his duty.
Azure Bonds has a species of humanoid dinosaurs, called saurials. The sidekick of the main hero is Dragonbait, a saurial paladin. You don’t get much more good-guy than that.
In The Last Starfighter, the hero describes his sidekick Grig as “a gung-ho iguana.”
From Alan Dean Foster’s Flinx books there’s Pip the minidrag ( short for ‘miniature dragon’ ), a flying “snake”. But Pip isn’t actually intelligent; she is empathic and spits corrosive venom though.