Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Before becoming one of today’s most intriguing and innovative mystery writers, Kate Wilhelm was a leading writer of science fiction, acclaimed for classics like The Infinity Box and The Clewiston Test.

Now one of her most famous novels returns to print, the spellbinding story of an isolated post-holocaust community determined to preserve itself, through a perilous experiment in cloning. Sweeping, dramatic, rich with humanity, and rigorous in its science, Where Later the Sweet Birds Sang is widely regarded as a high point of both humanistic and “hard” SF, and won SF’s Hugo Award and Locus Award on its first publication. It is as compelling today as it was then.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is the winner of the 1977 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Triton

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany’s 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of “the happily reasonable man,” Bron Helstrom — an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth’s own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he — or she — seems.

Shadrach in the Furnace

A Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist novel from a Grand Master of science fiction! A modern day Genghis Khan rules the world 30 years from now, after it has been ravaged by the Virus Wars. With billions slowly dying from genetic organ rot, there aren’t enough doses of the life-saving treatment. Not content with mere treatments and organ replacements to continuously extend his life, the Khan dreams of an immortal empire with himself as immortal emperor, and sets his personal physician, Shadrach Mordecai, to oversee the three lines of research that could grant immortality — but at what terrible cost?

Islands

She will never be one of them. When the immortality treatments failed, she knew her destiny would not be as glorious and carefree as the immortals. The immortals rebuilt the Earth after the great floods, but she is not one of them, and she doesn’t seem fit to live anywhere amongst them. When she finds refuge aboard the ship Ilium and begins ocean floor navigation, an adventure immortals would envy, she discovers a secret place. But she knows if she can unlock the power that the immortals lost on an island buried far beneath the land, the world and the immortals’ future will never be the same again.

Inferno

After being thrown out the window of his luxury apartment, science fiction writer Allen Carpentier wakes to find himself at the gates of hell. Feeling he’s landed in a great opportunity for a book, he attempts to follow Dante’s road map. Determined to meet Satan himself, Carpentier treks through the Nine Layers of Hell led by Benito Mussolini, and encounters countless mental and physical tortures. As he struggles to escape, he’s taken through new, puzzling, and outlandish versions of sin–recast for the present day.

“Camera Obscura”

Also published in The Arts and Beyond: Visions of Man’s Aesthetic Future (Doubleday)