Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

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Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

1977 Hugo Award Winner

Got it from: Public Library

254 Pages

The world is at war and politicians are leading everyone to a pit of chaos and destruction.  Fortunately a very skilled family of scientists sees the writing on the wall and decides to take action to save their family and loved ones.  Of course they respond to the challenge of ensuring their survival by turning to their very unique skill set, namely, the cloning of organic tissue.

The copy from the back cover of my copy promised it would be “one of the best treatments of cloning in  SF” and I’m here to tell you that statement wasn’t far off the mark.

A book in three parts and an epilogue

Like A Canticle for Leibowitz, WLSBS was written in three parts, with significant lapses of time between them and just as with ACL, the story in each of these parts can be wildly different from one part to the next.  In this case, it meant we heard the story of a different person with different problems and while I didn’t love it right away, by the time I reached Part III they had all coalesced and the whole turned out a great deal better than the sum of its parts.  Part I and II were okay but felt unfinished.  Part III was magnificent.  Mark turns out to be one of the most successfully seriously grave and seriously funny tricksters I’ve read in a long while.  I wish the epilogue had been edited out but I don’  want to give up too much so I’ll just say this book builds up steam like a locomotive only to be derailed by a penny on the track some kid put there to be funny.

An American story

A © of 1976 means everything for WLSBS.  It places it immediately after the passage of numerous federal environmental policies like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act to name just a few.  By this time, Silent Spring had been a part of the national consciousness for over 1o years.  Aldo Leopold had taught us to “think like a mountain”.  America had a renewed interest keeping our wilderness wild, keeping it clean and making sure our children wouldn’t forget the sound of birds singing.  We also had a renewed interest in transcendental thinking about the environment.  Around the time Wilhelm was writing this book, Environmental NGO’s were enjoying some of their highest membership and charitable giving they would see for many, many years.  By 1976 the Hugos had apparently turned their attention from the inky-black sky to our inky-green forests.

I caught this in WLSBS in a couple of ways but most prevalently in Mark’s character, his worries and his actions.  Mark thrived in the wild.  He loved the forest and the river and not only for his ability to seek solitude there.  It was a place for renewal and becoming one with the place he lived.  He was like a Henry David Thoreau of the future.  He needed the wild if he wanted to survive and he was trying his damnedest to remind the others that they needed it too.  When he scouted the remains of the big cities, he felt oppressed and not just for the symbol of how far civilization had fallen.  The cities epitomized the artificiality of the people in the valley.

But he also understood that there was something in the forest that he could never have and respected and feared it.  He knew the forest needed to exist on its own inaccessible to civilization and that it helps keep our sanity.  And in all these ways it seemed to me a book of its time.  Well, maybe this is just a case of me cramming two ill-fitting and unrelated puzzle pieces together, but if Wilhelm wasn’t intentionally saying it, I’d like to believe I’m not the only one to have picked up on it.

Recommendation

This is an apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novel but it is quite refreshingly removed from the usual tropes about urban survival, fear of the other, contagion or The Bomb.  Of course there has been fallout and everyone is worried about survival but the idea that a group of well-stocked and able doctors would worry more about the survival of their children’s children’s children was something new and different and cool.  I didn’t feel the actual storytelling offered much to get excited about, but the concept alone carried it pretty far.

HEP SCORE

Universe 3/5

Social/Political Climate 4/5

Dialogue 4/5

Scientific Wonders 3/5

Characters 5/5

Overall 19/25

Another roll of the die…

This week’s book is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.  This one has been highly recommended so I expect good things.

Next week’s book is To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer.  I’ve seen pretty mixed reviews but I like the sound of the title so…

Lord of Light

Stats

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

1968 Hugo Award Winner

Got it from: Our Library

296 Pages

Imagine you are one of the first settlers of an interstellar colony.  You could have free reign over how you’d structure society.  You could do anything.  Who wouldn’t at least entertain the thought of taking over all technology and couching your entire existence is Eastern religious beliefs?

When we enter Lord of Light, it has been many lifetimes since just such a thing happened and now, one of those firsts is uncomfortable with the treatment the gods have been giving the rest of the colony.  His name(s): Buddha, Siddartha, Mahasamatman, Sam, the Lord of Light, the Binder of demons.  His mission: Sack Heaven.

Who the… What the…

When I began LoL, I didn’t totally understand what was going on and though everything made sense internally, I needed to place it within some context and forced myself to read a little about the book earlier than I would have.  But it was still mysterious how they gained these powers and exactly how they exercised their attributes.  Even if we never got anything more than the back cover copy, I would have loved to learn more about the technology the gods controlled.  Instead, it was just a fact of existence and because it wasn’t ever talked about, it made the mystery even more excruciating.

Their technology was undeniably cool and they could control elements and the minutest physical properties of the world.  I just kept thinking, “when is he going to explain all this?!”  As we learned more and the gods’ abilities continued to just be treated as a normal fact of life, the mystery of exactly who the Firsts were and the history of the creation of this planet was too much for me.  I was practically laughing with excitement when it was told one of the gods was named Madeline; I just wish there was more.  With so much happening and gods constantly switching bodies and names, it sure would have made it a little easier to make sense of all the busyness too.

Especially in the case of Sam, I think a little more information would have been very helpful.  He’s been called the trickster character, but I’m not sure that I agree.  I think Sam has a very specific goal of undoing social injustice.  Sure he is breaking normal rules and kind of acting a fool generally, but I don’t think he is simply mischievous; he has made his own decision to change things and isn’t limited to just inducing others to action.  He is consciously making this choice to tear down the social structures he originally worked to put in place.  But then there are also a lot of things about him that fit the model of Trickster perfectly.  I don’t know, I guess I could be convinced either way.  Anyone wanna chime in?

I also wonder how anyone with little or no understanding of Hindu thought and culture would be able to make sense of the vague backgrounds Zelazny leaves us with and then the references to other minor characters and gods and rituals that are peppered throughout.  This has to be without a doubt, the most dizzying of the Hugo’s thus far.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

With that being said, I think this is exactly what people enjoy about Zelazny.  It happened in This Immortal as well.  Zelazny just throws his reader in the middle of not just some kind of action, but an entirely different world with different natural laws and complex, foreign social arrangements.  It is a bit disorienting at first, but once you find your place, his worlds are so completely satisfying and detailed that you can’t help but get sucked in.  It also makes me wonder if the re-read value of these books would be extra high?  I suspect so.

Agni, The Beast

I only took one course in college on Hinduism and it was one that I didn’t really get much out of.  I do seem to remember that that I may have written a paper about fire rituals and Agni was surely the most interesting to me.  This Agni did not let me down.  His outfit could have been something out of David Bowie concert, or maybe also Kanye?  Regardless, he looks and fights pretty BA and if after reading this, you aren’t jumping all over this book, I don’t know how to help you.

“He stands very tall,” said the demon, “and he wears black breeches and boots.  Above the waist he has on him a strange garment.  It is like a seamless white glove, upon his right hand only, which extends all the way up his arm and across his shoulders, wrapping his neck and rising tight and smooth about his entire head.  Only the lower part of his face is visible, for he wears over his eyes large black lenses which extend half a span outward from his face.  At his belt he wears a short sheath of the same white material as the garment—not containing a dagger, however, but a wand.  Beneath the material of his garment, where it crosses his shoulders and comes up upon his neck, there is a hump, as if he wears there a small pack.”

“Lord Agni!” said Siddhartha.  “You have described the god of Fire!”

“Aye, this must be,” said the Rakasha.  “For as I looked beyond his flesh, to see the colors of his true being, I saw there a blaze like unto the heart of the sun.  If there be a god of Fire, then this indeed is he.”

“Now we must flee,” said Siddhartha, “for there is about to be a great burning.  We cannot fight with this one, so let us go quickly.”

Chapter 4

So in the movie it sounds like Agni would be played by Elton John, no?  Well whatever… the point is that Zelazny’s characters in both This Immortal, and (but especially) LoL have been thoroughly entertaining.  My only complaint this time around is that they were too interesting not to give us more!

Recommendation

This one is a real test of its readers.  It is definitely well worth the energy but you need to be prepared to give it just that.  Don’t do something stupid and try to finish this as fast as you can in a week ;-)  Be prepared for quite a lot of mystery about characters that you just want to know everything about.  For me, I really loved the people and the places but I was kinda hoping for something more from the actual telling of the story.  I know!  It was like a wine with a great mid-palate and no finish!  There is a whole lot there to love but in the end it falls a little short of expectations.  I’m not sure I was able to give it a fair shakedown though.  I would normally love all this mystery and vagueness; I’m not sure why it was a problem for me this week.  I was so busy this week that I had to read the final 100 pages yesterday, so I think I need to put this right back on to my TBR pile now.  Maybe I’ll go for the audiobook if it exists.

HEP SCORE

Universe 4/5 (Loved the secret hideouts and gods running amuck around heaven)

Social/Political Climate 3/5 (a little confusing, a lot mysterious)

Dialogue 2/5

Scientific Wonders 5/5

Characters 4/5

Overall 18/25

This week’s book is The Way Station by Clifford D. Simak.  The fact that this is set in the past has got me drooling with delight.  Oh wait, that’s just because I need a nap.

Next week’s book is Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner.  Yet another new author for me.  I’ve been racking up the new authors this decade.  Also, this is the last book of the 1960’s so very soon there will be the flood of awards – gravity well, another M of the P, all the wrap up’s, what else is there again?