Kate Wilhelm - Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang is an unusual end of the world novel. It begins with the incredibly wealthy Sumner family who seeing all the signs that civilisation is collapsing - failed crops, disease and sterility - decide to set up a hidden research hospital where they can create human clones to repopulate the Earth after humanity has died. The first few chapters are rather plodding, exploring the collapse and the frantic search for scientific solutions to genetic problems. But once the clones become viable and are part of the story itself, the novel rapidly takes off - with echoes of Earth Abides, The Midwich Cuckoos, Stepford Wives and perhaps, I Am Legend.

The clones are human, but not. They cannot function as individuals, in fact individuality has no meaning for them. On an exploration trip some of the brothers and sisters cannot function properly, and one of them, Molly, becomes isolated and develops traits of individuality. Isolated from the other clones because of this, and for fear of infecting them, she gets pregnant and gives birth to a child who grows up to be free of the psychological limitations that affect the cloned children. This child, Mark, then becomes a foil for the clones - useful to them because he can go where others cannot, and becomes confident and at peace with the natural world. But he also threatens to undermine the whole clone "group think", because of his individuality - never mind his interest in the arts, culture and the world around them. Its a novel that makes the reader uneasy, with no morally upstanding figures for you to identify with.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang is a surprising novel for the 1970s. It deals, as many did, with the failure of human society, and the limitations of science in solving those issues. But it is also a fine rumination on the role of the individual and the limits of collective thinking. I wonder, to what extent, it was fueled by crude (right-wing) critiques of socialism which supposedly would destroy the individual. But it is as much anti-authoritarian as well as a critique of such ideas and consequently, today, the novel probably is read differently - there's quite a bit of focus on the natural world and its destruction, and resurgence after humanities' demise and at least one reference to the newish idea of global warming. Recommended.

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