Published : 1974Pages : 251
Overall Mark : 6/10
The Sumner family can read the signs: the droughts and floods, the blighted crops, the shortages, the rampant diseases and plagues, and, above all, the increasing sterility all point to one thing. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains gives them the ideal place to survive the coming breakdown, and their wealth and know-how gives them the means. Men and women must clone themselves for humanity to survive. But what then?
KATE WILHELM (1928-)
Kate Wilhelm has won many awrds for her writing, including the Hugo and the Jupiter for Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang and several Nebulas for her short fiction. She has also been influential beyond her writing through the Milford Science Fiction Writer's Conference, founded by her husband, Damon Knight, and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop.
VERDICT
The vision of a world over run with clones feels both real and worrying. Introducing a naturally born element reverses the usual view you'd expect in sci-fi of a clone living in a world of naturally born humans, and this makes the tale twice as effective as it could have been. My main gripe is the idea of deciding that the clones were in the wrong, and that naturaly born humans were in the right, as if it wasn't for the clones then humanity would have died out.
