Book Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm     

207 pages, Paperback
Published August, 1981 by Pocket (First published 1976)

Literary awards:

Hugo Award for Best Novel (1977), Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1976), Locus Award for Best Novel (1977), Jupiter Award for Best Novel (1977), John W. Campbell Memorial Award Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel (1977)

Being a science fiction writer and reader in San Diego gives me a unique position to spy on the next generation of writers as they emerge. Each summer the UC San Diego is host to the modern version of the Clarion workshop. It lasts around six weeks and is an intensive workshop for Science Fiction and fantasy writers. The list of teachers and students over the years is a who's who of genre fiction. John Shirley now an elder statesman of Science Fiction recently told us on the Dickheads podcast the story of jumping out of a tree to scare his teacher Harlan Ellison when he was a dog-collar-wearing punk rocker student in the 70s.

The tradition and the impact of Clarion are hard to undervalue when you read about students who become teachers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler talking about learning from Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula K. Leguin you get a sense.  When I say I spy I have never attended Clarion but the Mysterious Galaxy book store has for years hosted off-site book signings. The students often attend when the teachers host, and you can talk to the students and ask who the writers I should look out for. Sam J. Miller author of the genius Blackfish City is an example of this and he recently returned as a teacher, he is someone I discovered on those spy missions.

What does this have to do with Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang? This novel by Kate Wilhelm has been on my list for years. Ecological science fiction and weird apocalypses are absolutely my jam. The SF novel I consider to be the best of the 20th century is Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. I am a huge of Yarbaro’s False Dawn and The Sheep Look Up. This book is right up my very narrow alley.
As a fan of the history of Science Fiction, it was a goddamn shame,  I think of her impact through Clarion, but she won the Hugo for this novel. I had not read Wilhelm before and I had to fix that, her role in starting Clarion alone… The Clarion workshop that started in Pennsylvania, had a stay in Michigan and Seattle before settling here –  and it has been told to me it was her idea.  She and her husband Damon Knight (also a legend in the field) were two of the three founders with Robin Scott Wilson. That would be enough to make her a legend but Kate Wilhelm was a powerhouse writer not just of Science Fiction but of mystery novels as well.

In the late fifties her first accepted story, The Mile-Long Spaceship, was published in (John W. Campbell's) Astounding Science Fiction, and ten of her SF stories were published before the end of the decade. She wrote a long-running series of Barbara Holloway mysteries, about an attorney in Eugene, Oregon. Starting in 1991 the series is a precursor to the popular cozy mystery genre. Holloway and her husband would solve mysteries that combine detective work with courtroom drama.

Where Late Sweet Birds Sang however is considered to be her Science Fiction masterpiece. It won the Hugo and Locus award in 1977.  The narrative is divided into three parts, "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," "Shenandoah," and "At the Still Point."  The title borrows from the Star Trek tradition of using Shakespeare quote for the title, Matheson would do it too around the same time with What Dreams May Come.  The first part was published before in the 15th edition of Damon Knight’s Orbit series of anthologies.

All this is important history and despite what I think about the novel I want to make clear how important Wilhelm and this novel are.  Where Late Sweet Birds Sang, maybe I should just WLSBS from here out or just the novel. Ha-ha. This novel contains lots of fascinating and important ideas. I like the message but had trouble getting into this book. It has a special place with some of the other classics I mentioned as pointing to the crisis of Climate change when Jimmy Carter was still president. No little feat.

The main character of the first part is David, and he is our point of view for the collapse. The book opens with the weird details of his family. David sees the coming end and builds a community in a river valley in Virginia that becomes an isolated community as the human race dies out. The ecological issues are not the only ones, a global pandemic and mass infertility would mark the end. David’s family as farmers hip to the danger of the famines.

“The Wistons were farmers, had always been Farmers. “Custodians of  the soil,” Grandfather Wiston had once said, “not its owners, just custodians.”

The characters are thin in a style of writing that is indicative of a pre-word processor/ Stephen King-era style. To a modern reader, and more specifically this reader it is one of the weaknesses of the novel, a novel written even ten years later with the same concept would likely have double the length just to be publishing standard, and I don’t know that it would have helped.  The highlights of the book relate mostly to the intense world-building and prophetic character details make up for much of the novel’s shortcomings.

“There’s more drought and more flooding than there’s ever been. England’s changing into a desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and only in a year or two…”

Decades later, with 20/20 hindsight it is easy to assume everyone saw these possibilities. We have actual dates for fish die-off, the droughts have started and geo-political experts are starting to identify where wars over water are just decades away. But the details of how fast the world recovers are my favorite way the novel highlights the crime of ecological overuse…

“The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen.”

We are still heading to this future and in Wilhelm’s novel, the collapse is followed follow by infertility and the slow death of the human race. The earth is recovering while the human species is forced to use science to hang on by a thread.  David and his group of survivors don’t consider that maybe this is for the better. Wilhelm does however the about the weight of this in a few beautiful passages.

“He looked at the sky once more. Men had gone out there, he thought in wonder, and couldn't think why. Singly and in small groups they had gone into strange lands, across wide seas, had climbed mountains where no human foot had ever trod. And he couldn't think why they had done these things. What impulse had driven them from their own kind to perish alone, or among strangers.”

None the less her characters try to help the human race survive. They do this by cloning, and building a new culture one that they hope is more suited to the earth. Much of the narrative conflict comes from the clones who reject sexual reproduction and the small group of fertile humans.

 The ethics of these cloned children and how they are raised are touched upon in interesting ways. They have multiple copies of each style of child and of course that greatly affects individuality. On page forty of my edition, there is a whole exchange where the birth of the clones is compared to the raising of animals for meat.  The second and third parts of the book focus on this new civilization.

“They were happy because they didn't have enough imagination to look ahead, he thought, and anyone who tried to tell them there were dangers was by definition an enemy of the community.”

I found this element of the novel to drag a little bit. Wilhelm tells this story with paper-thin details and little to no humor. A story like this becomes tedious if there is no energy or attention given making at least a little fun. I found myself thinking about details I would have added to create more narrative drama. There is an interesting concept here for sure. Children Of Dune by Herbert, and Man Plus by Fredrick Pohl were among the nominees. Was this really the best SF novel of that year?

Personally, there are things about this novel  I respected, a few moments I thought were impressive but overall I can’t say I enjoyed this. I read plenty of retro SF that if not timeless doesn’t suffer from being from a different era. This one just felt like it was missing something.