‘Remember the Voices of the Trees’: The Turn from Technology in Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Science fiction since the 1970s has frequently featured environmental catastrophes of apocalyptic proportions as a starting point to imagine a better world. One such science fiction work from the mid-1970s is Kate Wilhelm’s haunting novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). Apowerful critique of the scientific application of human cloning, the novel is also a scathing commentary on the technologically driven and dependent lifestyle of late modernity. In the clones’ inability to display individuality, creativity and selfreliance, and the novel’s wilderness setting, it is possible to discern more than just a dislike and distrust of science and technology and the kind of authoritarian political models that culminate in nuclear war. Signalled also is a benign vision of nature that harks back to the ecological mysticism of the 1960s, the transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau, and the tranquil Arcadian lifestyle that in the United States preceded the expansionist push westward and the destruction of the wilderness.