Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
by Kate Wilhelm
Summary
The Sumners are a large, wealthy, interlocked family in the Shenandoah Valley, and by the early 1970s of this novel's world they can read the numbers: pollution, disease and collapsing fertility are going to end industrial civilisation and possibly the species. So they build a hospital and a laboratory in their valley, stock it, and prepare to survive by cloning themselves.
It works. The first cloned generation is raised in groups of identical siblings, and they turn out to be different from their parents in a way nobody anticipated. Raised as sets, they are telepathically close, cannot bear to be separated, and grow physically ill when sent away from their group. They are also excellent at maintaining what exists and incapable of inventing anything new, because originality requires being alone with a thought.
The novel runs in three parts across generations, and its argument sharpens as it goes: a society of copies is stable, cooperative, gentle to its own, and quietly murderous toward the individuals it occasionally produces by accident.
The middle section follows one such accident, a woman who begins to imagine again; the third follows the son she is exiled for bearing.
Wilhelm is excellent on the practical business of survival. Paper has to be made, a mill rebuilt, expeditions sent downriver to salvage from the drowned cities of the east coast, and those expeditions are where the clones break, because a group sent away from its siblings comes apart within weeks.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, elegiac and much quieter than its premise suggests, told in three parts that each jump a generation and change protagonist.
There is very little action and no villain. The society becomes monstrous by consensus, politely, in service of survival, which is far more frightening than a tyrant would be.
Best for readers who want the end of the world written as an argument about what makes a person, and one of the great overlooked novels of the 1970s.
Historical Context & Significance
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang won the 1977 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award and the Jupiter Award.
The title is the fourth line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, about bare boughs where birds used to sing, which is exactly the register of the book.
Kate Wilhelm's influence on the field runs well past her own fiction. With her husband Damon Knight she helped found the Clarion Writers Workshop and taught there for twenty seven years, shaping many American writers who followed, and she wrote about that teaching in Storyteller. She also helped Damon Knight run the Milford Writer's Workshop, founded by Knight, James Blish and Judith Merril.
She later moved largely to crime fiction with the Barbara Holloway novels, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003.