When the warning bells began to ring, heralding the end of human civilization on Earth, their message of impending doom was ignored. Crop failures, mineral shortages, epidemics, desertification, sterility, military conflict--all of these signs were ignored by those who had the power to reverse the decline of civilization. Only one small group of people had both the foresight and the resources to plan for the end.
During the last, dark days of the human era, the Sumner family used their enormous wealth and considerable scientific expertise to transform the Shenandoah valley into a self-contained habitat for the last remnants of humankind. But before long, they too were plagued by sterility. Unable to reproduce by any other means, they turned to cloning. But as the first few "generations" of clones matured and reached adolesence, they began to exhibit strange behavioural patterns and unusual--almost psychic--mental abilities. Most worrying of all, they showed no great affection for their creators. Soon, the Sumners began to wonder if they had destroyed the very humanity they sought to preserve.
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang owes a significant imaginative debt to John Wyndham's seminal novel, The Midwich Cuckoos. Like Wyndham's eerie, yellow-eyed "Children", Wilhelm's clones travel in packs of identical "brothers" and "sisters". Their apparent telepathy and collective consciousness inspires fear and, ultimately, revulsion, among their sexually-reproduced creators. Interestingly, the mechanism by which this bond is maintained is never revealed, forcing the reader to question whether such a gestalt being could actually be synthesized simply by raising a group of genetically identical people under identical conditions. Although it seems unlikely, Wilhelm makes it seem frighteningly possible, and that is the genius of this novel. As the relationship between the dwindling number of sexually-reproduced humans and their clone offspring deteriorates, as each generation of clones reveals itself to be stranger and less human than the last, we are forced to contemplate the awful--however unlikely--prospect that this, or something like it, could be an outcome of human cloning.
At times, Wilhelm's take on the issue of cloning seems more paranoid than legitimately cautionary. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang was written in 1976, more than two decades before the birth of Dolly the sheep: if the average person thought about cloning at all in 1976, she could do so with a degree of detachment that is impossible today. The Pandora's Box of cloning has been opened. The results appear in the newspaper regularly. Cloning is more familiar to us than it would have been to Wilhelm's audience in 1976--we don't even pause in our channel surfing as we pass the latest breaking news about cloning on CNN--but until we have each looked into the eyes of a cloned child, enough of the old paranoia will linger to make Wilhelm's parable give us the shivers.
All of this makes for an intense, page-turning, psychological novel, which helped secure Wilhelm her place among the luminaries of the science fiction canon (she is often compared quite favourably to Philip K. Dick). Happily, the novel is also beautifully, expertly written. The pace of events is quick, but not so quick that we do not have time to enjoy the scenery. And what scenery! Wilhelm's description of the burnt-out wreck of post-holocaust Washington D.C. is especially haunting and memorable.
Unfortunately, queer readers will not find Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang an affirming read. The acclaimed anthologist, Gardner Dozois, has praised Wilhelm as "...perhaps one of the most deeply and genuinely radical of SF writers, all the more so because she doesn't seem to have any one particular political axe to grind." (Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, p. 373-374) Queer readers might disagree. In Garber and Paleo's guide to queer science fiction, Uranian Worlds, there are no fewer than four references to Wilhelm's very negative portrayals of gays and lesbians (and no references to positive portrayals). In Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, the clones regularly engage in homosexual orgies among their clone "families", and all are bisexual. The fact that they are all genetically identical and that they interact like brothers or sisters makes their sex more than vaguely incestuous. The heterosexuals take a uniformly dim view of the sexual behaviour of their progeny--here, homosexuality is associated with civilization-destroying indolence and spiritual stagnation. This association is hardly unique to this work. The heroes of the story are the few clones who eventually separate from their collectives and, not coincidentally, "revert" to heterosexuality. It is not a stretch to interpret the novel's conclusion as a victory for heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Is it a coincidence that the book's "villains" are non-heterosexual, and that this is a recurrent phenomenon in Wilhelm's fiction? Does Wilhelm have a "political axe to grind" after all? What responsibility do we bear to admire the artistic achievements of a novel which is politically ugly (at least, to us)? These are questions I struggled with for a long time after reading this novel. They are not questions with easy, definitive answers, but I think we err if we shy from grappling with them.
A queer-positive novel this is not. It is, however, well-written and engaging. It is also a significant novel in the science fiction canon and is worth reading for that reason alone.