On 'Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang' and sci fi as modern fairy tale
A review of Kate Wilhem's "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" (1976)
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Science Fiction: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Literary: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Vibe: ★★★★★ (5 out of 5)
[No spoilers section]
Side note: by lack of spoilers, I mean nothing more than could be gathered from blurbs about the book. For example — plot elements that set up in the first few pages. If that's too much spoiling for you, why are you even reading a review?
Anyway.
Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) is fairy tale science fiction bordering on science fantasy — a long parable in the immediate post-apocalypse. There is science, but more at the level of what you might have seen in the news in the 70s: human cloning, atmospheric nuclear testing, environmental destruction.
James Watson had a well-known article in The Atlantic on cloning titled “Moving Toward the Clonal Man” in 1971. The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, and France had continued atmospheric nuclear testing until 1974. A Greenpeace protest had delayed a French nuclear test in 1972. It was all, pardon the pun, in the air.
The politics in the novel was both salient at the time as well as eerily similar to the discourse we see today — the Middle East and China as flashpoints, the potential collapse of the US as a superpower (Watergate versus our current Republican reactionary politics). The only thing left out of the book was inflation (which would also have been salient)1.
The blurb on Amazon “a high point of both humanistic and ‘hard’ SF” which per my review of Three Body further emphasizes the meaninglessness of the designation.
We follow several generations through the end of the modern world and the birth of a new one. It all happens very fast, but it's a short book so it's understandable. Wikipedia lists the page count at 207 vs The Dispossessed at 341, Diaspora at 376, and Three Body at 3022. The accelerated pace leads to some incongruences (more later, in the spoilers section).
Overall, I'd recommend it for a short read — it doesn't feel its nearly 50-year-old age at all. It flows breezily through a weird world that gets weirder.
Content warnings: The book contains sexual enslavement of women. However, it is written by a woman with definite dystopian critique a la Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985). In fact, that later book echoes this earlier one in that regard. It also contains archaic references to aboriginal people of the US (“Indians”).
[Spoiler section]
The main conceit of this book is that group selection propagated via cloning does not select for cultural traits such as creativity or individuality. Regardless of the merits of group selection as a theory (it is debated) — I liked this as a sci fi thought experiment because I do not believe what we think of under the vague umbrella of “intelligence” is strongly heritable. We can see a world where people are genetically identical to their scientist progenitors but culturally devoid of curiosity or innovation. Eventually this leads to a dead end — with the clones unable to adapt to changes in their environment or even produce replacements for their cloning technology. They have to venture into the wilderness to salvage it from ruined cities.
That said, there were some moments where cock my head and think “Really?” As a child who grew up on the edge of development in similar biome to rural Virginia, frequently venturing out into the undeveloped woods, I took great delight in laughing at the clones who would get lost just a few feet in. However, as a reader I was like — what happened to the roads? There should still be roads, so there’d be no need to have a dichotomy solely between riverine or cross-country travel.
We are only a few generations out from the 1970s, and despite the ending of global warming bringing colder weather back to the Eastern seaboard — slowly cracking the surfaces — we should still have roads almost everywhere east of the Appalachians. No traffic means both fewer potholes generated by freezing plus road wear, but also means vegetation will start to work its destructive power. Net effect given no maintenance is going to be degradation — but abandoned Roman roads are still around almost 2000 years later.
There would likely be some local destruction in the aftermath of the collapse of civilization to prevent the roving bands of raiders from easily finding you. However, by the time of the clones getting lost in the woods, the raiders are gone and majority of the rivers of concrete and asphalt should still be there. I-66 was mostly complete west of DC by the mid-70s and US 50 was planned in the 1920s. Both cross the Shenandoah before it reaches the Potomac, and both head directly to DC.
In another temporal acceleration, that colder weather appears to result in a full on ice age by the end of the book with glaciers advancing as far south as southern Pennsylvania. However, our CO2 emissions will be keeping the atmosphere warmer than the 1970s for centuries even if we stopped all pollution today. Ice ages can take 2400 years to set in (per this study).
I realize the point of the novel was to reset North America3 to a pre-European, in fact pre-Bering land bridge, era with no human habitation aside from this one surviving clone colony. And the speed of the return to nature (outside of the cities themselves) is almost utopian. No one wants to read real time documentation of Nature slowly healing on a scale of 10s of 1000s of years while also following characters on a scale of 10s of years. These were just a couple things that jumped out at me while I was reading — and might cause another reader to give up in frustration.
In fact, one of the more unrealistic aspects is the lack of an effect of inflation with elder members of the community converting assets to cash despite the ongoing calamity.
I had Kindle editions. Interesting to me is that Three Body felt by far the longest of these four and The Dispossessed felt shorter than both Diaspora and Three Body.
Likely the entire world, but we don't see that in the novel.