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?