The clones, though wary of his threatening individuality, hope to study him in order to learn more about non-clones. After a few years of successful secrecy, she and the child are found, and although Molly and Ben are expelled from the community, the child, Mark, is allowed to stay.
In secret, she goes on to have a child with Ben, one of the clones who accompanied her on the journey to the surrounding cities. Though Molly is allowed to live by herself in peace, she is not allowed contact with the other clones except the members who bring her the supplies she needs. One woman, Molly, after being separated from her clones while on an expedition to find materials in the ruins of nearby cities, regains a "human" sense of individuality, which her fellow clones believe to be dangerous to the community. As the old generation dies out and the clones seek to expand their territory, they quickly discover that prolonged separation from other members of their group produces irreversible psychological stress. The new generations are cloned in groups of four to ten individuals, and due to a strong emotional and mental connection between the clones, they have a strong sense of empathy for one another. The original members of the community, too old and outnumbered by the clones to resist, are forced to accept the new social order and the complications that arise. However, to the horror of the few surviving members of the original group, the clones who are finally coming of age reject the idea of sexual reproduction in favor of further cloning. The assumption is that after a few generations of cloning, the people will be able to revert to traditional biological reproduction. From cloning experiments conducted through the study of mice, the scientists in the small community theorize that the infertility might be reversed after multiple generations of cloning, and the family begins cloning themselves in an effort to survive.
As the death toll rises, mainly to disease and nuclear warfare, they discover that the human population left on earth is universally infertile. With a range of members privileged by virtue of education and monetary resources, one large family founds an isolated community in an attempt to survive the still-developing global disasters. The collapse of civilization around the world has resulted from massive environmental changes and global disease, which were attributed to large-scale pollution. The novel takes place in Virginia, somewhere near the Shenandoah River, and quickly establishes its plot line in a post-apocalyptic era. The title of the book is a quotation from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. In its time, Orbit was known for publishing works of SF that differed from the mainstream of science fiction being published at the time.
Kate Wilhelm was a regular contributor to the Orbit anthology series, and assisted Damon Knight and other contributors with the anthology's editing. īefore the publication of Wilhelm's novel in 1976, part one of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang was featured in the fifteenth edition of Orbit. The novel is composed of three parts, "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang," "Shenandoah," and "At the Still Point," and is set in a post-apocalyptic era, a concept popular among authors who took part in the New Wave Science Fiction movement in the 1960s. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a science fiction novel by American writer Kate Wilhelm, published in 1976.
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