Kate Wilhelm
1976
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
Kate Wilhelm’s writing is subtle and understated. It grows on you gradually.
This story sucked me in so slowly, in fact, that at first I thought it was going to be boring.
Also,
the first part of the book, which takes up about a quarter of its total
length, is basically an introduction to the rest. So many major events
happen and so much time passes during that first section that it seemed
like too much; I thought I was never going to be able to get into any of
the characters. I would just start to get attached to one and then they
were gone.
The later sections of the book go at a better speed,
however. And for them to work as well as they do, I have come to think that the first part
has to cover that much ground.
This is a post-apocalyptic story
in which we have destroyed our environment with radiation and toxic
chemicals. All the pollution and contamination cause people to become
infertile and, over time, Earth’s human population gradually dies off
and dwindles down to almost nothing. And, to top it off, another ice age
begins and glaciers start crawling all the way down into Maryland.
Only
one very organized, very wealthy family in the Shenandoah Valley
continues to reproduce – by cloning themselves. They saw the writing on
the wall, trained themselves on the necessary technology, and built
themselves a secret compound complete with hospitals, laboratories,
incubators, schools, and dormitories.
This is all very well and
good and controlled at first, but then instead of sticking to producing one child at a time, the family
scientists begin to produce multiple sets of identical children. At first there
are twos and threes and eventually they get up to sevens and eights.
The
sibling sets start to discriminate against oddball “singles” with
increasing viciousness. And, at the same time, the sets grow
progressively more and more group-focused until they are completely
dependent on their clone brothers or sisters to function. They are
unable to think originally or creatively on their own.
Ironically,
this means that the clones themselves are headed for extinction, since
they cannot invent new technology or repair their equipment when it
breaks, much less adapt to the approaching glaciers. And they have
ostracized the single children, the only ones who have a hope of doing these things.
I did think that the ending was a
little too neat. But, overall, I liked the book. In particular, I
thought that Wilhelm did a good job of taking an idyllic setting and a
group of happy fresh-faced youths and gradually making them into
something more and more sinister and unpleasant. Something almost as
sinister and unpleasant as… junior high school.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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