Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1976)Read about the other entries on the list at Tor.com.
Humanity has industriously worked glorious transformation on the Earth, the equal of the End Permian and the End Cretaceous, perhaps even the Great Oxidization Event. It’s an achievement in which to take pride, save for the pesky detail that humanity itself is among the species being quickly ushered towards mass extinction by pollution and radiation-induced infertility. Personal doom can be such a downer on an otherwise momentous occasion.
Fortuitously for the Sumner clan, not only are they largely indifferent to the fate of people with the poor taste not to be Sumners, and not only are their vast Shenandoah Valley holdings an ideal redoubt in which to wait out the collapse of civilization, their great wealth has provided them with the means to circumvent infertility and thus extinction: cloning. A succession of perfect genetic replicas will ensure the Sumner legacy survives. Or so it appears, before certain previously undocumented features inherent in cloning manifest…
--Marshal Zeringue
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