Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

 Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

The Short of It

Plot: After a pandemic causes infertility, the only way for humans to survive is through cloning. But are they really human? 

Page Count: 251

Award: 1977 Hugo and 1977 Locus 

Worth a read: No
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Moderate.
Review: Disappointing and disjointed. There are a lot of messages here that just get blended together to nothingness. Cumbersome writing, uncompelling characters, bland dystopia, and just a dull story. Odd choices on where to discuss science at length and where to just skip over it. First third was its own story originally, and is the best part.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

This book feels far longer than its 251 pages. Reading it feels like a chore; the descriptions are both long and lifeless, the characters unimaginative and interchangeable, the plot outrageously thin. Perhaps it is simply that many, many, many other books have taken the human sterility premise and done far more with it.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang focuses pretty much exclusively on sterility and countering it. Instead of this being about world building, it is the only part that matters. Take Children of Men, for example. Humans being unable to reproduce is central to both world and story, but actual events take place, people interact, there is motion. This one? Not so much. 

Each of the three sections focuses on a different main character. Each also has its own cast of supporting characters. If you were worried that you might lose track of who is who, don't, because it does not matter.

Wilhelm seems to have asked herself which apocalypse would best fit this story, and answered... "All of them!" This is a monologue from Chapter 2:

“You listen to me, David. You listen hard. I’m telling you what the goddamn government doesn’t dare admit yet. We’re on the first downslope of a slide that is going to plummet this economy, and that of every other nation on earth, to a depth that they never dreamed of.

“I know the signs, David. The pollution’s catching up to us faster than anyone knows. There’s more radiation in the atmosphere than there’s been since Hiroshima— French tests, China’s tests. Leaks. God knows where all of it’s coming from. We reached zero population growth a couple of years ago, but, David, we were trying, and other nations are getting there too, and they aren’t trying. There’s famine in one-fourth of the world right now. Not ten years from now, not six months from now. The famines are here and they’ve been here for three, four years already, and they’re getting worse. There’re more diseases than there’s ever been since the good Lord sent the plagues to visit the Egyptians. And they’re plagues that we don’t know anything about.

“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 in only a year or two. The anchovies are gone. The codfish industry is gone. The cod they are catching are diseased, unfit to use. There’s no fishing off the west coast of the Americas.

“Every damn protein crop on earth has some sort of blight that gets worse and worse. Corn blight. Wheat rust. Soybean blight. We’re restricting our exports of food now, and next year we’ll stop them altogether. We’re having shortages no one ever dreamed of. Tin, copper, aluminum, paper. Chlorine, by God! And what do you think will happen in the world when we suddenly can’t even purify our drinking water?”

If you're the type who skips over massive block quotes, I've summarized it as well.

• Government lying
• Economic crisis
• Rampant pollution
• Radiation
• Zero population growth
• Famine
• Disease
• Drought
• Flooding
• Mass extinction
• Lack of anchovies
• Fishing destroyed
• Crop blights
• Rampant shortages
• Inability to purify water

I do appreciate that pollution gets one sentence and fishing gets four, though some are fragments. It's hard to justify this as anything but lazy writing. You'd think that with so much going wrong, the book would be exciting, or engaging, or interesting, or tolerable. Alas. This same laziness impacts other parts of the story. Wilhelm relies more than once on the truly frustrating "He learned everything from books!" trope. Lost in the woods? He read a book about it. Designing a canoe? Book. Telling stories? Alright, that one makes sense. Still, it's Deus Ex Libris and I'm not about it. 

Also, maybe this is a personal thing, but I struggle to get on board with characters whose driving motivation is being cousins who are in love. When the protagonist has to speak to his love interest/cousin and say:

“Celia, you listen to me! There aren’t any hereditary defects that would surface! Damn it, you know that! If there were, we simply wouldn’t have children, but there’s no reason. You know that, don’t you?”

It's a struggle to get in his corner. 

There are parts of this book that I really did enjoy. The very beginning of Chapter 1 sets up a great family dynamic. Descriptions of art in the second and third portions of the book are often evocative. The bits on psychological conditioning in the later parts of the story are all enjoyable. It's just that none of this gets even close to redeeming this as a book.

I can imagine wanting to read this, but I don't recommend it. If, however, you were a rebel without a cause, and the cause that you have now picked is reading book recommendations and ignoring them, consider using the link below. I'll get a few cents at no additional cost to you!
'Tis a link.

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

Hey, it's been at least a few entries since we analyzed heavy-handed inclusion of Communism! Well, wait no longer, it's that time.

There is almost nothing here that is not about communism. Wilhelm wears her politics on her sleeve. Society is homogenized - in this case, due to clones. Free thought is repressed. Those who do not share in the vision are removed. Intellectuals and artists are unwelcome. It is only together that we can achieve. Everything is decided by council. The only end of this society is its own continuation.

Once again, it's just so lazy. It's not subtext when it is the only focus of the book. Example time!

"We all know and agree it is our duty to safeguard the well-being of the unit, not the various individuals within it. If there is a conflict between those two choices, we must abandon the individual. That is a given. The only question is how."

“I’m going to dissect your every thought, your every wish, every dream. I’m going to find out what happened to you, what made you separate yourself from your sisters, what made you decide to become an individual, and when I find out we’ll know how never to allow it to happen again.”

“There is no individual, there is only the community,” he said clearly. “What is right for the community is right even unto death for the individual. There is no one, there is only the whole.”

The hero, of course, is the one who defies this, who has his own identity. 

“That book is a lie,” he said clearly. “They’re all lies! I’m one. I’m an individual! I am one!”

Fittingly, he is also ruggedly competent and outdoorsy, and people look to him with a mixture of fear and respect. Because his is the American Way.

This is a supremely frustrating book to read. Writing is lazy to the point that it is almost humorous. Symbolism is so on the nose that even Rudolf would hide his face. Wilhelm invokes every apocalypse imaginable, but the biggest disaster is the book.