Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a languid and melancholy story about the end of the world, and what happens afterwards. At some point in the late 20th century, a rising crescendo of environmental crisis topples humanity. Disease, plagues, resource shortages, and political instability ravage society. The large and prosperous Sumner family is prepared to do whatever is necessary to survive, and David, a biologist with Harvard, collects a hospital’s worth of cloning equipment, just before the end arise. Whether it’s luck or foresight, the cloning tanks are necessary to ensure the Sumner’s survival, since every higher creature is rendered infertile by the environmental crisis. Cloned humans perpetuate the family, but drive the older generation away, since clones and born humans think in fundamentally different ways.

The second and much larger chunk of the book concerns the clones, and their struggle for survival. No stockpile is infinite, and the vital materials necessary to maintain the complex apparatus of the cloning tanks are running out. The problem is that the clones need each other to stay sane. Brother or sister groups of six to ten individuals must stay in constant contact. The clones are hopeless in the woods, unable to make the long journeys to ruined Washington DC and Philadelphia. Even worse, there seems to be some sort of flaw in the cloning system, which leads to complete organic degeneration after four generations. A few natural births serve to replenish the numbers of the clones, but each subsequent generation is less capable of independent and creative thought, more stuck in rote habits.

Against all this is our protagonist, Mark, renegade child of renegade clones. Mark is an artist, explorer, prankster, individualist, who learns woodcraft and builds canoes to explore the Shenandoah river the East Coast. Mark try to guide, protect, and stimulate the dying clone society, but some things are beyond saving. In the end, he breaks away with a handful of women and founds a new simple and honest agricultural community on the Gulf of Mexico. Civilization dies, but mankind survives.

On the plus side, Wilhelm has obvious talents as a prose stylist. But this a book that is hampered by its Big Ideas, rather than enhancing them. Things that are artificial are bound to die and fall. Only the natural grace of the woods survives. The brittle society of the clones isn’t worth saving, but Mark’s heroic individualist is granted rather than earned. The bucolic and melancholic are not my favorite themes, and that’s about all there is to Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. It does do this much better than Atwood's Oryx & Crake series, and stands as an interesting early example of environmental science fiction.