Much as I admired other contemporary writers - Dick, Disch and Ellison in particular - for me, finding my voice as a writer in the early ‘70s, the paradigm-shifting novel was Kate Wilhelm’s Margaret and I. It was that book, published in 1971 (four years before The Female Man) that made me see that women’s experiences were valid material, and that a good SF novel could be both idea- and character-driven.

Science fiction writers were rarely praised for their ability to create believable characters (sometimes that’s OK), and even now the psychological and emotional complexity Kate Wilhelm demonstrated in her writing, her ability to combine intellectual excitement with real feeling, remains exceptional.

I would love to see both Margaret and I and The Clewiston Test (a modern gothic shocker about the life of a woman scientist) recognized as ‘masterworks’ and brought back into print, but, in the meantime, it’s good to have Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang in the canon.

It’s a classic story that begins with a powerful (inevitably male dominated) group taking steps to survive the global catastrophe they are wise enough to anticipate, and who are determined to keep humankind alive by reproducing themselves, regardless of cost. Forced reproduction as a natural imperative was attacked by Joanna Russ in her 1977 novel We Who Are About To…, but Wilhelm does not take a polemical or particularly feminist stance here. What she has done is to combine the pleasures of an atmospheric, evocatively-written, character-driven novel with the intellectual rigour of a thought-experiment. Although Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang offers some of the attractions of the ‘cosy catastrophe’ it goes deeper than many stories about what might happen after the fall of civilization, to raise issues that are both fascinating and disturbing.

Human cloning became a hot topic in the 1970s, yet treatment of the subject in fiction tended to be unrealistic, played for laughs or horror. Only a few SF writers addressed the matter seriously, and while Kate Wilhelm’s imagined families of identical, empathically linked sextuplets is scarcely the last word on the subject, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang remains probably the best novel ever written about human cloning (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, hardly science fiction, is the only contender).

Unsurprisingly, this haunting novel was received with much acclaim, winning not only the Hugo, but also the Jupiter and the Locus Award for Best Novel in 1977. It is a powerful work and displays its author’s particular strengths, her ability to create complex, flawed, believable characters, her ability to evoke a strong sense of place, the muscular. unfussy, yet atmospheric prose, and a story that engages both the intellect and the emotions.