Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Kate Wilhelm
- First Published: 1974
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction—post-holocaust
- Time of Work: The 1970’s to the mid-twenty-first century
- Setting: Rural Virginia
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction, Apocalyptic and catastrophe fiction
- Subjects: Virginia, 1970’s, Art or artists, Future, Twenty-first century, Imagination, Painting or painters, Radiation, Clones or cloning
- Locales: Virginia
The Plot
Kate Wilhelm’s futuristic plot exaggerates the familiar conflict between an individual and the community by supplanting the nuclear family with sterile clans of six to ten physically identical, intuitively connected clones. With increasing force in each of three episodes, highly individualistic protagonists struggle first to understand their separateness and then to save the community.
In the first episode, as radiation pollution spreads blight, sterility, and epidemics throughout the world, young David Sumner pursues secret cloning research in his wealthy...
[The entire page is 970 words long]
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