Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a science fiction novel by the American writer Kate Wilhelm, published in 1976. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1977 and the Locus Award, and its first section had appeared in the Orbit anthology series a year earlier. The title is a quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, and the book is told in three parts.

The book is set in Virginia, near the Shenandoah River, after a collapse brought about by large-scale pollution, environmental change and disease, with nuclear war finishing what was left. A single extended family, with the education and the money to act early, establishes an isolated community in the valley to wait out the disaster.

The catastrophe turns out to include a universal loss of fertility, and the family's scientists begin cloning in the hope that the community can continue. Their descendants are organised for cooperation and continuity rather than for individuality, and the novel follows the generations that come after, including the ones who begin to notice what the arrangement costs.