It's True!

Beginning in the early 80's I taught college prep English and eventually a college credit class called Humanities.  My goal was to present the arts, especially literature, as they evolved through time focusing on Western civilization. It was a special challenge to figure out how to present the future through a literary selection, and I decided to use Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.  

Copyrighted in 1976, this amazing piece of science fiction featured a plot revolving around the collapse of civilization as we know it.  Members of the Sumner family residing somewhere on the East Coast try to cope with global challenges such as protecting the environment from pollution, world famine, climate change, computer technology, wilderness survival and, most pressing, how to manage the growing power of human clones.  It is a startling well-written look into the future as Wilhelm imagined it from her long ago vantage point.

None of those topics seem outlandish today, but as we studied the book in the early 80's we were astounded to even think about the problems as being real.  Within a few years, though, Dolly the sheep was cloned, climate change began to be noticed, computers arrived in the classroom and diseases such as ebola are now showing up in countries where just feeding the populace is a struggle.  In other words, the events in the novel have come true.

Scary. I remember wondering if I should discontinue teaching the book as a look into the future presented by science fiction when everything in it was becoming part of our reality.  The students said, "YES" so I kept it in the curriculum.  As I moved toward retirement in 2001, I saw that the book continued to be meaningful to students simply because it did envision our modern day life so accurately from so long ago.

Kate Wilhelm is (was? I don't know if she's still alive) an Oregonian who had teaching connections to the U of O and this book was the winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in its time.  I think it's been reprinted and might be available on-line.  Read it if you can get your hands on it. You'll be surprised at how accurately the future was foretold.