Name: Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
ISBN: 9781473232310

Kate Wilhelm

The Sumner family can read the signs: the droughts and floods, the blighted crops, the shortages, the rampant diseases and plagues, and, above all, the increasing sterility all point to one thing. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains gives them the ideal place to survive the coming breakdown, and their wealth and know-how gives them the means. Men and women must clone themselves for humanity to survive. But what then?

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang

Where late the sweet birds sang

Kelsey Lynn

Finally getting back to my Hugo read through after a long hiatus. I've been looking forward to this book, with only the cover flap to go by. The flap for my edition (book club 1976 I believe) has the summary for part one, which os only about 45 pages and first appeared in Orbit. It does not go into the plot of 75 percent of the book. 
 After part one, the characters and plot of the flap are done. The characters aren't even part of it anymore. 
 So while I was excited for a family being replaced by clones and almost a thriller. I got instead, a very calm book focused on a popular dystopian concept of 'I' And 'we'. The clones from part one have created their society, family units of the same cloned person making up almost a collective conscious. When some clones are seperated from their brothers and sisters, they go 'crazy' and begin to reject their groups and thinking as an 'I'. 

The story is told in multiple steps, following the first happenings of this, and then a child being born with no clones and only knowing 'I'. 

It's a cyclical tale, of human consciousness and survival, but told in a very lovely introspective way. Truely a lovely and quick read. Making me want to read Rand's Anthem or Zamayatin's 'We'.

However, there is something that just doesn't work with this book. The pace feels odd, there will be pages upon pages dedicated to something mundane, and then suddenly with just a chapter break, it'll be months later, or a completely different point in the story. The worst case of this is the finale, the ending and epilogue are so disjointed, it's like an entire book of information is missing to explain how we got from point a to point b. There are some beautiful parts in this book. But I think this might be an early case of having a couple great bullet point ideas and moments, and then an author forcefully stitching them together. There was a sad emptiness to this book, some of which was intentional I believe, but I'm not convinced all of it was. It was missing something, some breath of life to truly make it special.

Natalie Hanna

This was pretty impressive. It definitely packed so much into a fairly short book and explored some interesting ideas. I loved Wilhelm's reverance for the forest and I really liked the character of Mark. As far as drawbacks, the story requires you to suspend your disbelief since the science isn't grounded in real science I don't think. There was also sometimes a weird undertone which made the book uncomfortable to read but it's forgivable for the engrossing story.