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WoGF Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm
Stephanie (Rhetori_Cat), became a fan of science fiction and fantasy when she convinced her dad to hand over his copy of Ender’s Game by creepily reading over his shoulder until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Since then, she’s turned her love into a research interest as she works on her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition (don’t worry, nobody knows what that means). Her blog, Speculative Rhetoric, focuses on the relationships between speculative fiction and theories of gender, language, communication, and rhetoric.
The blurb on the cover of my copy of Kate Wilhelm‘s 1976 novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang claims that it is the best novel about cloning ever. I was skeptical at first, but by the end of the novel I was pretty convinced that Wilhelm was doing something unique with the issue of cloning, engaging with the ethical issues from a different direction. At the same time, I’m still struggling with how to understand the final message of the text, whether Wilhelm wants us to celebrate the “individual” or understand that the “individual” is constructed out of a particular set of circumstances.
The Plot: David and his family begin reading the signs of the coming apocalypse with enough time to prepare an elaborate medical facility and living space for many people, including farmland and livestock. It quickly becomes apparent that the spreading plague and chemical fallout is making many of the inhabitants of the compound, both human and animal, sterile, and David and his fellow biologists design a plan for maintaining the human race via cloning. However, as the clones grow and develop, it becomes increasingly clear that they are incredibly alien from their human elders; rather than distinguishing themselves as individuals, clones understand the cloned siblings collectively to constitute a unit, and the mental development, including telepathy, reflects this. As the human elders die off, the clones set up a new society, but when the clones send off an exploratory party made up of individuals from different sibling sets, the traits of individuality begin to reappear, eventually resulting in the casting out of one woman and her further imprisonment upon becoming pregnant. Her son, Mark, is the protagonist on the last third of the novel, as the clones begin to exhibit signs of depletion in creative thinking and problem-solving skills and Mark begins his own plans to save the human race.
