Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang (1977) - Plot & Excerpts
(Edit to add: the review below contains what some may consider to be spoilers. But on the whole, I do not think that reading this review will spoil the enjoyment of the book for you.)Science fiction stories usually concern the impact of the progress of science on human beings. When the science part dominates, it is called “Hard SF”: when the human part dominates, it is “Soft SF”. However, this is not a rigid categorisation as most Hard SF stories (for example, Asimov’s Foundation series) contain some sociology, and most Soft SF cannot exist without some science. The most fascinating Soft SF stories deal with a society unalterably modified by science, and how human beings come to term with it.Did I just say “human beings”? Well, as far as Kate Wilhelm’s Hugo and Locus award-winning novel, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is concerned, you can add the word “almost” – since most of the characters in this story are clones. The StoryThe novel is a dystopia: one that many science fiction writers seem to love – the whole world having gone to hell on a handcart. Wars, pollution and pestilence of Biblical proportions are slowly wiping out life on earth. To compound the problem, human beings and animals are becoming increasingly sterile. It seems that the world is doomed to extinction.The filthy rich Sumner family, up in their farm on the Shenandoah Valley, have read the signs early and have found a solution. They will preserve an island of stability and sanity in a world gone volatile and mad in their mountain citadel – and led by the gifted Dr. Walt, Harry Vlasic and David Sumner, they develop the ultimate answer to sterility – cloning.So far, so good. Only, they discover too late that clones are not humans in the true sense of the word. Much more single-minded and efficient than their originals, and sharing an extra-sensory empathy with one another, they soon take over… and the world seems ready for a new species. A society where individuality is unknown and any deviation from the group is frowned upon; where sex is a group activity and the production of children, other than the cloned ones, is by harvesting a handful of fertile women as “breeders”. It is the end of humankind as we know it.Or is it?On a field trip to gather information and building materials (a perilous one that a few hardy individuals periodically make – it is literally a matter of life and death for any clone to be separated from the group for too long), Molly, the artist, is touched and permanently changed by nature. She can’t go back to the group existence any more: she has rediscovered humanity. Her art becomes steadily less utilitarian and more idiosyncratic, and she begins questioning group values. Of course, this striving for individuality is major deviant behaviour among the clones, so they isolate her in the old house, with its hoard of books. Unknown to them, she is carrying something else – the son of the doctor Ben in her womb.Molly and her son Mark enjoy an idyllic existence in the old house for five years until they are ultimately discovered. Mark is taken away to live in the communal nursery with other children, and Molly is assigned the role of a breeder, a baby – producing machine. But once touched by nature, man cannot become a machine again. As the clone community declines because of lack of innovation, abhorrence of nature and the steadily dwindling resources from a dead world, Mark, the earth-child, provides the spark to ensure that humanity is born again.***The novel is structured in three parts: the first part (and in my opinion, the weakest) showing the development of the society of the clones and their takeover, the second part detailing Molly’s “conversion” and the third, the renaissance of humanity through Mark. Even though it attempts to be nothing other than science fiction, the mythical overtones are hard to miss. David Sumner is the original savior prophet/ hero, who creates the chosen race and is ultimately sacrificed by them: Molly, the Mother of God/ Mother Goddess: and Mark, the persecuted God Child/ Hero/ Messiah of the new world.Kate Wilhelm wrote this novel in the seventies, when the cold war was going strong. For Western Europeans and Americans, the Soviet Union was the Devil Incarnate and the ultimate dystopia, a place where human beings have lost all claims to individuality and function only as cogs in the machine, as epitomised by the communist bloc (we now understand that this was far removed from the truth). In those days, a communist takeover of the world was a real threat in the mind of the average American; the end of civilisation as we know it. Part of the success of this novel is that that particular paranoia is explored in detail, without being judgmental.“The Freedom of the Individual” is at the heart of the American secular religion, sometimes (in the opinion of citizens of other countries) carried to ridiculous extremes (one cannot imagine a philosophy like Ayn Rand’s meriting serious consideration anywhere else in the world). Collectivism of any kind is to be abhorred. So imagine the situation if the human race becomes collective, not through force, not through choice, but as an inherent feature of their biological make-up? That is what the author does, and her prediction on the fate of such a society is clear and unambiguous: death by atrophy of the spirit.The passage reproduced below encapsulates the author’s philosophy in a nutshell. …He looked over the class, and continued. “Our goal is to remove the need for sexual reproduction. Then we will be able to plan our future. If we need road builders, we can clone fifty or a hundred for this purpose, train them from infancy, and send them out to fulfill their destiny. We can clone boat builders, sailors, send them out to the sea to locate the course of the fish our first explorers discovered in the Potomac. A hundred farmers, to relieve those who would prefer to be working over the test tubes than hoeing rows of carrots.” Another ripple of laughter passed over the students. Barry smiled also; without exception they all worked their hours in the fields.“For the first time since mankind walked the face of the earth,” he said, “there will be no misfits.”“And no geniuses,” a voice said lazily, and he looked to the rear of the class to see Mark, still slouched down in his chair, his blue eyes bright, grinning slightly. Deliberately he winked at Barry, then closed both eyes again, and apparently returned to sleep. The community where everybody is forced to work in the fields and children belong to the group and not to their parents seems like a parody of Chairman Mao’s China.It is interesting to note that Mark saves the society because he is more in tune with nature than the clones who needs the presence of each other for sustenance and cannot survive alone. While stressing individuality, Ms. Wilhelm also seems to advocating the recognition of our umbilical tie to Mother Earth (Gaia, Bhumi, call her whatever you will). Presumably it was the separation which brought about the unnamed catastrophe at the beginning of the story – a scenario which eerily parallels the situation we find ourselves in today…
David Sumner has a problem: the world as he knows it is about to end. what's a brilliant young man and his equally brilliant family to do? why, bring back members of that extended family, store supplies, circle the wagons, and build a lab which will eventually help the Sumner family to repopulate the earth, of course. sounds like a good plan to me.there's something about the 70s that I just really dig. many things, actually. besides the wonderfully hideous clothes and the wonderfully not-hideous moustaches and of course all of the brilliant movies, one of the things I like about that decade is the science fiction that came out of it. sci-fi that is confident mankind is headed for cataclysmic change any day now; sci-fi writers that came up with all sorts of ways that mankind can survive or transform or transcend or even just die. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is such a book. one of the very 70s things about this novel is its sweet but not saccharine attachment to nature... if you don't dig nature, you have a lot to learn man. there's a vagueness to that sentiment just as there is a vagueness to what exactly is causing the world to break down. and that vagueness is also pretty 70s. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is not the sort of novel that will spell things out for you. you either dig it or you don't dig it. Molly of the Miriam Sisters has a problem: she went on an expedition to see what could be found out there, and she came back changed. she doesn't see things the same way. she should probably try to change back; she's making her duplicate sisters uneasy and her community deals with unease in fairly drastic ways. but she doesn't want to change. she's not sure why she is drawing these disturbing images or why she finds such new comfort in nature, in being by herself. but she likes it. she likes being an individual.and that's another great thing about the 70s, in sci-fi and beyond: that interest in exploring the necessity of both individuality and community. Wilhelm does not paint this after-the-fall society in broad strokes so that the reader can easily hiss at it. there is a nurturing, loving vibe to this future community. people support their siblings automatically. sexuality is nonchalant. it is a community that cares for its citizens. well, in its own way. but of course in the end Wilhelm cherishes individuality and this community is shown to be deeply flawed. if this sounds like the novel may be some kind of didactic screed on individualism, well, it's not. Wilhelm is subtle. she is a lovely writer but she is also fine with making the reader a bit uncomfortable. Molly's "descent" into individuality is eerie and unnerving, haunting, as strange an experience for the reader as it is for this new and vaguely threatening Molly - no longer of the Miriam Sisters. Mark has a problem: he is not like the lab-bred brothers & sisters, and they don't like that. the clones don't like this natural-born kid. but they need him, they need his skills, they need his bravery, they need his ability to understand nature and to be by himself. unfortunately, they don't actually know they need him and how badly they need individuals like him for their survival as a race. at one point Mark builds a snowman. the young clones don't understand it and they don't really see it - because it is a lone snowman, no lookalike snowmen surrounding it. so they pelt it with snowballs and tear down the monstrous lone thing.I love how this kid is portrayed as an arrogant little asshole who mercilessly pranks his clone relatives, blithely uncaring of the genuine harm they can and often expressly want to do to him. assholes make the best heroes for me because I can often see myself in them. I like their flaws, their humanity; heroic heroes are often quite tedious in the end. the 70s had no problem with asshole heroes. but although Mark is quite a jerk, he has something his family members don't understand outside of their clone groupings: empathy. jerks who are empathetic know how and where to hit the hardest. and so Mark hits the clones hard, right where it hurts.great novel! a classic.
What do You think about Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang (1977)?
Well, I definitely expected to like this book more than I did. Almost everyone I know who has read it has rated it very highly. I take a few issues with it:1. Half the book is more of a summary, and the book is just plain too short for the story it is trying to tell. It reminded me of A Canticle for Leibowitz in that way, told in three parts, from an author whose greater strength, arguably, is in the short story. Wilhelm is well known for her decades of contributions to Orbit (see recent anthology of her work in that magazine in Kate Wilhelm in Orbit, Volume One.) Either it should have been broken into separate books to really give the author time to tell the full story of each part, or she should have given us less of the backstory - a true summary, no characters. In the end, why do we care which family owned the land? They didn't end up mattering one bit, other than the fact that they provide the genetic code for the future society.2. Breeders. Every book that demotes women to baby factories as a "solution" for our "future society" is never going to win with me. The men get to decide what happens, and the women have the children. It is frustrating coming from a female writer in particular, I don't care that this was written in the 1970s. She is talking about clones! Why can't they just be in the test tube so women can have another role? 3. The book is a framework to allow Wilhelm to spout her ideas of adaptability and creative thinking (my terms are taken from this Guardian review which also explores why we like post-apocalyptic literature so much.) I don't disagree with these ideas but I prefer story over message. The Cory Doctorow novels that do this same thing bother me in the same way (Pirate Cinema just being one example, although not all Doctorow suffers from this, to be clear.)4. I also found the survival tactics to be a bit unbelievable, relying on outside food sources and recon missions for multiple decades? When the major cities have burned or been hit with something radioactive? Perhaps the after-effects of radiation were not fully known in the 1970s but there would have been mega contamination issues. At least they were traveling in the water and not on roads. She seemed more interested in the nuclear winter concept, focusing on dropping temperatures and ice fields. Actually, this was a popular future-disaster trope in the 1970s and I almost could have used far more of it rather than the focus on the clones and the incest.5. The audiobook itself may have taken this book one notch. The narrator is female while most of the points-of-view in the book are male. So most of the time she is trying to do male voices and not really pulling it off. I would have picked someone else to fit the feel of the book better.
—Jenny (Reading Envy)
Dealing with the sensitive subject of cloning and its effects on an isolated colony of clones, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, is a continuous storyline separated into sections with many years in between them. Each segment, so-to-speak, has it's own protagonists and antagonists and crises to deal with and overcome. Even with the skipping of years in-between segments, the story-line stays pretty continuous and the reader is really able to develop a bond with the characters in a way that I wouldn't think possible with each segment introducing new individuals (or are there actually individuals in a cloned society!) Overall, this is a wonderful novel filled with adventure, mystery and tough questions regarding what it really is to be either an individual or part of a community. I would highly recommend, not only to science fiction fans but to anyone who wants to be able to have something to think about while also having an enjoyable reading experience.
—Stefan Yates
I've finished Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, and I liked it quite a lot. Ostensibly a post-apocalyptic novel about cloning, it's basically a meditation on the role of individuality and our relationship with nature as defining elements of being human. Kate Wilhelm suggests that our grounding in our own sense of individualism and our feeling of kinship with nature are powerful components of humanity that we would not do well to outgrow. The genetic holocaust that overtakes her near-future world
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
