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28 Days Later
I'm a survivor ... Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later. Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is also a survival story. Photograph: Peter Mountain/AP
I'm a survivor ... Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later. Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is also a survival story. Photograph: Peter Mountain/AP

Back to the Hugos: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

This article is more than 12 years old
If you can survive the daft material in this post-apocalyptic tale, you'll find Wilhelm's world a fun place to play the survival game

I have a theory that helps explain some of the allure of post-apocalyptic literature. To understand it, I want you to quickly imagine the near-annihilation of most of our species, and what you'd do afterwards ...

How are you doing?

Interesting?

Now, my idea is that while you spent a while wondering what an apocalypse might be like, you hardly hesitated at my suggestion that you yourself would still be around. There's something about the way we're programmed, and our overriding survival instinct, that makes us tend to assume that we'll be among the (un)lucky few left picking up the pieces come the End Times. Eradication is something that happens to other people.

So, we find it easy to identify with the heroes of post-apocalyptic stories. They're survivors like us. Similarly, we derive satisfaction from observing their survival tactics. We like to think about what we'd do in their shoes – and the thought is curiously appealing. In plenty of post-apocalyptic literature, making your way through a shattered landscape seems to have the same backwoodsman feel as camping – only you can put your tent up wherever you like because there's no one around to complain, and the scenery's better thanks to all those romantic ruins.

Okay, it's probably not the best theory. I'm already starting to see problems. Like the fact that dozens of people are likely to post below this article saying they didn't imagine themselves surviving at all. But I think it does account for some of the appeal of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. On all sorts of levels, this book is rubbish – but even so, Wilhelm makes the ruined planet seem like a place you might like to be.

The story starts just as most of the world is ending. There's a "bug that nobody wants to name", there's pollution, there's war, and there are plenty of other unpleasant things happening, as explained in this exemplary piece of dialogue: "We've changed the photochemical reactions of our own atmosphere, and we can't adapt to the new radiations fast enough to survive!" Oh, and everyone's gone impotent.

The large and wealthy Sumner family's survival plan is to hole up in the Appalachian mountains and work for the continuation of the species by setting up a lab and cloning themselves, hoping that further down the line, the clones will be able to breed properly.

The Sumners' gambit hits a snag when the clones grow up and decide they'd prefer to make more clones instead of breeding. "Don't be an ass ... You are not a separate species," says one of the old humans to a clone, but he is wrong. For a start, the clones have telepathic links to their clone-brothers and clone-sisters and a special kind of group consciousness. (Occurrences which are never properly explained, and seriously undermine the story's scientific credentials.) They also have sex in strange ways. (Wilhelm appears to be fascinated by incest. She has non-clone cousins lusting after each other too. And she produces some awful writing on the subject: "They made no sound to awaken the others as their bodies united in the sexual embrace...") They're also dispassionate, aloof and unconcerned by human suffering. (On this last point, at least Wilhelm does well. The clones are chilling.)

As the story moves on, the clones themselves run into problems. Later generations discover that they are too scared to go outside. They have to leave their Appalachian home to find resources, but travelling away from their fellow clones gives them severe anguish and mental problems. Each generation also becomes more frightened by nature and less able to think independently or spontaneously. In the latter stages of the book, the focus shifts to Mark, a child born after an illicit love affair between two renegade clones. Mark is a normal, thrill-seeking, artistic boy who loves drawing and playing in the woods – all very strange in the clone colony – which makes him a perfect cipher for Wilhelm's central argument about evolution and adaptability being essential for survival, as events rather too inevitably prove.

A great deal of that material is daft. Factor in spiritual mush about "voices in the leaves" of trees and related ripe dialogue, and you might think that the book would be unreadable – but it isn't. It's a long way off the high standard of most of the Hugo winners in the 1960s and 70s, but there's still plenty going on here. There's tenderness in the relationships between Wilhelm's more human characters, and intellectual satisfaction in working through her ideas about cloning (even if they are ultimately unconvincing). Most of all, there's the fun of the survival game. There's an appealing romance to the idea of the Appalachian redoubt and excellent descriptions of the woods surrounding it: of rivers flooding as dams burst; of nature growing ever stronger as mankind retreats. Conversely, there are evocative descriptions of ruined cities, empty buildings and tiny groups of people moving through vast empty landscapes, putting together primitive boats to sail into the newly unknown, prows beating against the flood. It all seems like a splendid adventure. The fact that it is so much fun goes against the dark central thesis, and like much else in this book could even be described as a flaw, but it's a good reason to keep reading. I almost wanted to be there. Almost ...

Next time: Gateway by Frederik Pohl

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