Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang Review

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

The human race is dying out and a small group tries to save it by experiments in cloning.

The story starts when it is already too late to save the world as we know it.  A small group who realized the danger before the rest of the world was willing to accept the truth had started to prepare and plan for the future.  They decide the only way to save the human race is to create clones.  As the clones start to take over from the originals the story starts to explore the importance of individuality, imagination, original thought, and having differences.  It was a quick start and you were soon in the middle of the main issues as the original humans were starting to find themselves obsolete.  And it makes you think about what humanity is as the clones take over and it becomes apparent that they think differently, and do things differently.  The question comes up of whether they have saved the human race or created something completely new.  But even though I found the concept interesting it took me a while to get into this story.  Due to the very nature of the characters there is a lack of emotion at times that I found hard to connect to.  It took longer to get to know these characters and care for them.  In time I did, but it took a while.  I would say that if you are at all interested in post-apocalyptic stories (or clones) you should definitely give this one a try.

(As a side note, in the copy I borrowed from my library some of the pages were in the wrong order.  So if you are reading and the next page doesn’t seem to make sense look at the page numbers.  All the pages were there and never further than one page away from where it should have been so you can read everything in the right order if you realize what in going on at the time.)