A Canticle for Leibowitz

Miller does an excellent job of weaving religion, regular science fiction and a 1000 year narrative. I hope you enjoy it.

The abbot was musing about what was bothering him — something in the back of his mind that he couldn't place. I thought this was a nice bit and certainly relevant to our times:

Here's another quote from the book that has me thinking of today's technocrats:

Another passage relevant to our times — especially when you see congregations of Christians adopting the faith of the Therapeutic State. This is from the third abbot bemoaning the real threat of a another nuclear war:



The next one holds to the Kungian Rule about comforts, rather than being satisfying to people, instilling even a larger sense of dissatisfaction. I forget just which ordinal rule this is or what the proper title is. Perhaps Mr. Kung will inform us.



Miller obviously has an eye for secular idiots. Here the abbot is talking to one of his monks after having had a rather heated conversation with a sort of “doctors without borders” NGO nitwit.



Man, did this author know his subject.

First published in 1959, it does seem that Walter M. Miller Jr. had a pretty good all-around view of the cultural forces in play.

Good related thoughts, Mr. Flu.

I finished this book and indeed it is another…



One Amazon reviewer titles his 4-star review, “A Bleak Exploration of Humanity.” I don’t disagree. Another reviewer writes “This had me from page one. It is beautifully written and each key character intimately drawn.” Ditto.

One reviewer writes:



I’d never heard of this novel or this writer before. Starting in the late fifties (at least), it became “cool” to be a materialist/atheist, to worship at the altar of “reason,” and to turn your nose up at anything remotely “superstitious.” That Miller explores a whole lot of issues in telling this relatively simple story is interesting and he does so in a mold that is not the one that so many lazy and stupid sci-fi writers adopted then and later. That he was not reflexively anti-Christian in this book is probably why I’d never heard of this. I’m guessing it wasn’t a big hit at the time. Or maybe it was?

Miller wrote (or compiled) a book with Martin H. Greenberg. One reviewer says of it:



I don’t find A Canticle for Leibowitz to be anti-war, but it certainly is a bleak view of mankind, and deservedly so.

But nothing in this book is off the scales. This is not a compendium of crude stereotypes. It’s surprising to read an evenhanded sci-fi book that takes on this subject and writes at a human scale. This guy is blessedly free of grandiosity in his writing. It is a shame that his own life was apparently tragic. But you don’t have to have clinical depression to suppose that there could be one or more nuclear exchanges that “fundamentally transform” the world.

Mr. Miller should be alive today to write a story about viruses doing the same, although we’re getting that story for free. I find it somewhat beside the point to review the contents of the book. Just read it. More interesting in regards to book reviews is the somewhat uniqueness of it. I had long given up on sci-fi because it had all become so dull and politically correct. And once again this proves my point: To find sci-fi worth reading, you have to turn back the clock at least to the early 70’s if not earlier.

If Brother Francis’ world could be ruined by intellectual pointy-heads and power-hungry politicians, so too can literature (as so many of the other arts) be ruined by not just political correctness but the artlessness that comes from people living meaningless lives.

This is the kind of book I want to read because it means something. You can get something out of this. It’s something to think about. It’s not just pablum. You’re not just another termite chewing through the pages of a book just to fill the time.