Bookshelf Essentials: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Hello book tube. I've got another bookshelf essential for you. This is a category type video that David Wylie made up at years ago on his channel where you look at all the books that you own.

[00:00:11]Uh and you pick the special ones, the ones that you really can't imagine being without.

[00:00:16]Uh and today I have I I a few of the bookshelf essentials I've been doing recently have been examples from broader categories. So I mentioned uh Pogo by Walt Kelly. I hold up one book, but it could be any number of Pogo collections. It's the whole run of Pogo.

[00:00:35]Uh I held up James Tiptree, the short story volumes of James Tiptree the other day.

[00:00:40]Uh it that could have been broader as well.

[00:00:42]There are a couple of other short story collections and also a couple of novels.

[00:00:45]And they're all really good. Uh and today I I didn't think about this. I thought this was going to be a bookshelf essential just about one book, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing by Kate Wilhelm.

[00:00:55]Uh but I then I realized that there this also is a broader category. Not Kate Wilhelm, who uh a lot of her science fiction really pleases me. A lot of the work that she's done that isn't science fiction does not please me at all. It strikes me as weirdly lazy, almost like it was written by a different person. Uh but so it's not so much that as it is this, Timescape.

[00:01:17]That also could be a bookshelf essential, just Timescape just in general. For a while, for a few years, that was a banner on top of uh science fiction paperbacks, science fiction mass market paperbacks. And it was a weirdly reliable banner.

[00:01:34]I don't know. I have never actually plumbed into the details. I don't know how many details are preserved. I wish somebody would write a book on Timescape. Not the book Timescape, which is which was his named after, but rather a book about this imprint. I would love that. Don't know how much of that documentation even survives. I've never delved into it, but you can tell when there's a really good editorial team involved in a project like some branding, whether it's Timescape or New York Review of Books or whatever. You can tell when the when the editorial team is not just phoning it in.

[00:02:05]When they've got a good eye, they pick well, they stand by good things.

[00:02:09]I quickly became accustomed to hunting out Timescape books at the metal spinner rack at Troy Striegel's store. I There are all sorts of other books there.

[00:02:18]But if I saw a science fiction that had the Timescape banner on it, I thought, "Okay, that's probably going to be really good."

[00:02:25]Uh they also had these banners around them, and the banner on some Timescape novels was interrupted by a number if the Timescape book was a Star Trek novel. Um and some of I believe there is a quality difference between the Star Trek novels that were originally Timescape books and the ones that weren't. Um but uh I realized when I was when I was picking this, because this is a terrific science fiction novel, one of the best of them, uh that it could also be that. It could also be that Timescape is a bookshelf essential. I should do a separate video on that. But this is this is a story that is it's big. It's not not It's deceptively paged, but it is a big story about a family, a wealthy family in a secluded homestead, uh that realizes that the end of the world is coming.

[00:03:10]Natural disasters abound, plant fai- crop failures abound, and also, alarmingly, fertility rates are plummeting. They're cratering. And this family has the means and the foresight to try to do something about it, to make a kind of isolated community, uh and also to deal with the fertility issue by means of cloning.

[00:03:33]Uh this Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang came out in 1976.

[00:03:39]So, necessarily, a lot of the cloning stuff in here is speculative.

[00:03:44]Uh but nevertheless, uh the story isn't just that decision. This the the novel the narrative moves on from that. It's a big broad-scale thing, where we get a generation of clones and then another generation of clones and then another.

[00:03:56]Society adapts to having these clones among them. And the clones turn out to be different than anyone expects. They are, first of all, communally linked. Not necessarily telepathically, although it's pretty it's pretty clear that in the in the course of the book that they are, but they are definitely a a group organism as opposed to the the flinty individuality of the humans that made them.

[00:04:20]And when that first batch of clones grows up, they actually comment on that in some in some scenes in here that are they're just There's a whole bunch of scenes in here that are just indelibly memorable. In one of those scenes, one of the the grown-up clones is talking to one of his creators and says, "Well, now, actually, we we think that that uh this this individuality stuff is overrated.

[00:04:45]You all have that and you screwed up your world. We don't value it at all. We don't want it.

[00:04:49]And we won't be prizing it in our future generations."

[00:04:53]Um chilling moments like that that just sort of undercut what you're expecting from a book about post-apocalyptic survival.

[00:05:02]Uh who is the enemy here? Is it Is it the the ravaged world or is it maybe this population of beings, artificial beings, that you have built up amongst yourselves? And also, where is that individuality?

[00:05:15]Is that part of you biologically?

[00:05:18]Is it going to crop up even in clones?

[00:05:22]And what will they think of it?

[00:05:24]If if for the most part they are comfortable with communal living, communal thinking, communal feeling, then how will they feel about the the odd occasional member who doesn't feel that way, who's out of sync, who's off by themselves?

[00:05:36]One character in particular, one clone in particular, a young woman who likes to go off by her own and draw pictures.

[00:05:42]She makes satirical sketches of everyone around her in the in encampment.

[00:05:47]And she she doesn't automatically feel the worry or the happiness of her sisters.

[00:05:54]Uh and in the in the the high point of the novel for me is when the other clones, some of the other clones go to some of their their human makers with questions about her. Can you do something about her? Can you talk to her?

[00:06:08]And maybe get this to change. Get this worrisome individuality to change. And there's uh they have a couple of great scenes together. This one is one where she turns the tables on him because she is asking him. She asked him, "Do breeders feel happy?"

[00:06:24]She shouldn't be talking about the breeders at this point in the book, and she shouldn't be asking about things like feeling happy. It should never cross her mind to do.

[00:06:31]Uh she asked after a moment, "No."

[00:06:34]"What is it like for them?"

[00:06:37]"I'll make you a fire. The chimney's gone is open. I checked."

[00:06:41]"No, what happens to them, Ben?"

[00:06:43]"They are given a course in learning how to be mothers. Eventually, they like that life, I think."

[00:06:49]"Do they feel free?"

[00:06:52]He had started with logs in the grate, and now he dropped a large one with a crash and stood up. She's working on him, and it's it's it's working. It's irritating him. Uh he went to her and swung her away from the window.

[00:07:05]"They never stop suffering from the separation," he said. "They cry themselves to sleep night after night, and they are on drugs all the time, and they have sessions of conditioning to make them accept it. But every night, they cry themselves to sleep. Is that what you wanted to hear?

[00:07:19]You want to think that they were as free as you are now, free to be alone, to do with what they want with their thoughts, with no responsibility to others? It's not like that.

[00:07:27]We need them. We use them in the only way that we can to do this uh to do the least harm to the sisters who are not breeders.

[00:07:37]When they're through breeding, if they are fit, they work in the nursery. If they're not fit, we put them to sleep.

[00:07:42]Is that what you wanted to hear?

[00:07:44]"Why are you saying this?" she whispered, her face ashen.

[00:07:48]"So, you won't have any illusions about your little nest here.

[00:07:52]We can use you, do you understand? As long as you are useful to the community, you'll be allowed to live here like a princess, just as long as you're useful."

[00:08:00]"Useful how?" she wants to know. "No one wants to look at my paintings. I finished the maps and the drawings of the trip They put her artistic use her artistic abilities to use.

[00:08:10]But, there's a limit to that. "Uh I'm going to dissect your every thought," he says. "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.

[00:08:24]And when I find out, we'll know how better we'll know how how never to allow it to happen again."

[00:08:32]She stared at him. And now her eyes were not luminous, but deeply shadowed, hidden.

[00:08:37]Gently, she pulled loose from her hands her hands from his from her shoulders.

[00:08:42]"Examine yourself, Ben.

[00:08:44]Catch yourself.

[00:08:45]Who else is angry at the way we treat the breeders? Why did you fight to save my life when the good of the community demanded I be put to sleep like a like a used-up breeder?

[00:08:55]Who else even looks at my paintings?

[00:08:57]Who else would rather be here in this cold, dark room with a madwoman than at a celebration?

[00:09:03]Our coupling is not joyous, Ben. When we embrace it, a hard, bitter, cruel thing we do, and we are filled with sadness, and neither of us knows why. Examine yourself, Ben, and then me, and see if there's a cause you can root out and destroy without destroying the carriers."

[00:09:20]Savagely, he pulled her to him and pressed her face hard against his chest so she could not speak. She did not struggle against him. "Lies, lies, lies," he muttered. "You are mad."

[00:09:33]But, nevertheless, she's not.

[00:09:36]Because one of the most intriguing things about a reread of this book is the way that individuality creeps up. It bubbles up.

[00:09:44]It is clearly Kate Wilhelm saying that it's part of human nature, even with the problems that it brings, even with the worlds that it destroys. But it's part of human nature. By the end of the book, the latest generation of clone children are all very different from each other.

[00:09:58]They're all individuals. They might be grouped, they might be linked, but individuality is returning to the world.

[00:10:05]With all the the ominous notes that I believe Kate Wilhelm wants to be there.

[00:10:11]I mean, she clearly shows us in the course of this book that the communal living of the cloned people, of the cloned uh individuals is more peaceful, more empathetic, certainly.

[00:10:24]That, in other words, if they ran the world, the world would never have ended.

[00:10:30]And that mental uniformity is ending in the end of this book. It's just I love it. I think it is is absolutely great. I was looking at all my books thinking, "What about a bookshelf essential?" I was thinking, "Well, could you imagine not having not just this book but the Timescape paperback of this book?" I can't really imagine that. So, I thought I would make it my bookshelf essential for today.

[00:10:50]Uh but I'll move on next time. I'll see you then.

[00:10:54]Thank you, Book Tube.