http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1346180...

This is a rather unusual Hugo winner. It's a curious amalgam of the great post-holocaust novels Earth Abides and After London on the one hand, and the suspicion of clones latent in Brave New World on the other. The depiction of sexual politics as humanity tries to reinvent itself is core to the narrative: the clones' society turns out to be intellectually and biologically sterile, and their sequestration of fertile women to drug-addled maternity is pretty appalling. I felt that Wilhelm was asking some pretty serious questions here, if not necessarily providing the answers; in any case, as an author rather than a politician, the former rather than the latter is her responsibility. ( )

A haunting masterpiece, and the definitive book about human cloning. Kate Wilhelm should be regarded as one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. ( )

“Silent Spring” meets
future: cloning to survive.
Free thought dies out too.

While the story does manage to avoid a lot of the "dated-ness" common in late 70's science fiction, isn't overly moralistic and didn't swing into detailed gratuitous "sexual liberation"... (it is there, just not excessively graphic as it might have been) it's really just an average story with no big surprises, a bit slow in places, okay in others.

All in all - it's nothing to write home about, but it's an okay story if you've got nothing better on your plate, or you want to hear an okay science fiction/post-apocalyptic story. ( )

I liked the meditation on what it meant to be human, and how something is lost when loneliness is obliterated. Lyrical. Nice. I liked it. ( )