|
|
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
If all birds were of a feather, would you let one marry your sister?
 |
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
|
|
By Kate Wilhelm
|
|
Orb Books
|
|
$13.95/$19.95 Canada
|
|
Trade Paperback, Sept. 1998
|
|
ISBN 0-312-86615-1
|
|
|
Review by Nalo Hopkinson
 ate Wilhelm first published Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang in 1976. The novel examined man-made environmental disasters and the then-science fictional notion of cloning. In its day it was held to be a rigorous, compelling blend of humanistic and hard SF, and it went on to earn the Hugo Award for Best Novel. It was not a serene read then; it is not now.
Wilhelm imagines a world in which human beings have finally managed to pollute the Earth's resources enough to cause crop failure, the deaths of whole species and catastrophic climatic changes. It's the fictionalized outcome of Rachel Carson's cautionary book Silent Spring, which is said to have launched the modern environmental movement, and which warned of the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use.
In the novel, humanity has poisoned its own genes. Worldwide fertility rates drop to zero, and in a few generations, humans will be extinct. A small, isolated population discovers that the infertility will eventually wear off. Its members turn to cloning themselves as a way of continuing the human race until the genetic damage has been undone. But the eerily interdependent clones outlive their creators, and they have no reason to trust the genetic recombination of sexual reproduction; their comfort is in the similarity effected by cloning. They have free will, and their own ideas about their destiny. Will they be the salvation of humanity, or its replacement?
Seen from a distance of 20 years, Wilhelm's warning about the dangers of depleting Earth's resources have proven to be prophetic. Environmental changes? They're here. Poisoned waters? Genetic malfunctions? Plagues? Those too. Clones? Scientists are working on them.
The feminist wave
In the '70s, feminist writers entered the SF arena, forging the gender-inclusive language in which the literature is now fluent. By its style, readers knowledgeable in the history of SF could likely guess the decade in which Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang was first published. It has an almost nostalgic feeling to it, a burnished sheen like old gold.
Members of the Sumner clan, the family whose story the novel tells, create generations of carbon copies of themselves; sibling clones who display an empathy that borders on telepathy. The clones develop their own society, which values the sibling group, not the individual. Clones panic when they are alone for very long. Too late, the originals realize that the clones don't share their goals of restoring human diversity through sexual reproduction. They are happy to keep reproducing through cloning. The novel becomes a fascinating exploration of the tensions between the two paradigms: diversity versus sameness.
Wilhelm dauntlessly explores a lot of speculative territory, particularly the notions of how a clone community's sexual mores might differ from ours. The language around sex seems a little coy to seen-it-all '90s sensibilities, but Wilhelm nevertheless makes her meanings clear. What might a society be like if it still enjoyed sex, but didn't need it for reproduction? If the core unit of "self" is a sibling group that provides bonds closer than any other, would an incest taboo develop? Or would sex with selves be the equivalent of masturbation? If concepts of "self" and "other" change, what might then happen to concepts of sexual identity/orientation?
Throughout the novel, Wilhelm graphically paints pictures of the personal, human costs of excessive damage and waste. It's a shame the species has done so little to heed her warning.
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is as well crafted and sympathetic as it is scientifically rigorous. It's timely to have this novel re-issued now, in a world where the cautionary fiction of the '70s comes close to being the reportage of the '90s.
-- Nalo
Back to the top.
Three In Space: Classic Novels of Space Travel
Three SF masters journey to the stars
|
Three In Space
|
|
Selected by Jack Dann, Pamela Sargent, George Zebrowski
|
|
A White Wolf Rediscovery Trio
|
|
$14.99/$19.99 Canada
|
|
Trade Paperback, Jan. 1998
|
|
ISBN 1-56504-866-0
|
|
|
Review by Damien Broderick
 s the title suggests, Three in Space collects three important journeys into space: The Voyage of the Space Beagle, by A. E. van Vogt; Galaxies, by Barry Malzberg; and The Enemy Stars, by Poul Anderson. Each of these remarkable novels is introduced by the SF connoisseurs who chose them, including Jack Dann, Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski. (Galaxies also includes two afterwords.) Upmarket denizens of SF's generic ecology, the compilers retain a fondness for the wonderful pulp dreams incubated by generations of John W. Campbell's famous magazine Astounding, now called Analog.
Van Vogt's first stories for Astounding, "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" (from 1939), became the closely reworked heart of his landmark 1950 novel of intergalactic travel. In The Voyage of the Space Beagle, four terrifying aliens disrupt an episodic expedition to Andromeda. Gluing the tales together is the patient missionary work of Elliott Grosvenor, the ship's Nexialist, an interdisciplinary holistic thinker and forerunner of van Vogt's classic supermen.
Twenty years later, under the aching title "We Have Fed Our Sea" (from Kipling), Anderson's Astounding serial The Enemy Stars augmented relativistic travel with instant matter transmission. Crew and supplies teleport by tachyon beam to the starship Southern Cross. A remnant black sun smashes her engines and 'caster web. What her aghast crew find, struggling to rebuild their link home, is the price in blood of admiralty, and community with a people utterly unlike themselves.
Ironically, the source of Malzberg's postmodern novel Galaxies from 1975 was several Campbell Analog articles about black holes. Solo pilot Lena and her cargo of 515 frozen dead plunge into a black hole (variously and characteristically misidentified as a "white dwarf," "neutron star," and "galaxy") and torment themselves with elegant futility. "To define terms at the outset," the narrator observes, "this will not be a novel so much as a series of notes toward one."
Three generations of star voyagers
In 1939, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt published their first stories. Van Vogt, chosen 1995 Grandmaster by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the only one still alive. His influence remains visible everywhere, from Star Trek and Star Wars to the most surrealist slipstream SF.
Two decades after van Vogt's tale of an almost indestructible alien loose among scientists on a starship eerily like the Enterprise, a second generation of Campbell's children was peaking, more fluent and often better trained in the sciences. Poul Anderson, 1997's Grandmaster, offered a poignant hard SF novel about the quest for knowledge of the human heart, and first contact with alien minds. Its physics updated in 1979, it closes this volume.
Tucked between is a text tagged as SF only by twisting the genre's definition to the breaking point, as its audacious author surely intended. Galaxies seems no less radical today, in its taunting, metafictional way. Malzberg's bleak realism about life and text deconstructs SF's melodrama into something vehement, painful, extraordinary. In 1975, six months after Joanna Russ's equally transgressive feminist novel The Female Man, it marked an end to innocent SF tale-telling. The book brandishes its contrivances, forcing readers to slog through Malzberg's own mocking meltdown as a highly self-aware artist toiling in the humus of a medium he genially despises, satirizes without mercy, and perhaps loves.
This handsomely packaged retrospective will enthrall genre newcomers (who should read Malzberg last) and fetch a nostalgic tear from old-time fans. It represents not only three journeys into space, but also three important voyages into science fiction's history.
Each of these books was significant in my own life. I gulped down van Vogt's wonderful novel as a kid and dreamed of being a Nexialist. Anderson's melancholy poetry moved me deeply in my late teens. In maturity, Malzberg teased me with mysteries of narratives deeper, in their way, than deepest space.
-- Damien
Back to the top.
|
