A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Summary
After the nuclear war came the Simplification, in which survivors hunted down and killed the scientists and engineers they blamed, and burned every book they could find. A Jewish electrical engineer named Isaac Edward Leibowitz founded a Catholic monastic order to hide texts, was martyred, and centuries later is a candidate for sainthood.
The novel is three novellas set six hundred years apart in the same abbey in the American southwest desert.
In the first, a young novice on a fasting vigil finds a fallout shelter containing a shopping list and a circuit diagram in Leibowitz's hand, which the order treats as sacred relics and copies with illuminated gold leaf without any idea what they mean.
In the second, a secular scholar arrives as knowledge begins to be reconstructed, a monk has independently rebuilt a working electric arc lamp, and the abbot understands that the Church is about to lose control of what it preserved.
In the third, civilisation has spaceflight and nuclear weapons again, refugee camps are filling, and the abbot is in a losing argument with a state doctor about euthanasia for the radiation sick.
A wandering old Jewish man appears in all three sections, apparently the same person across twelve centuries, and Miller never explains him, which is the single best decision in the book.
Around three hundred pages, wry, learned, full of untranslated Latin and monastic comedy, and steadily devastating as the pattern becomes clear.
The Church is treated with real sympathy and no sentimentality at all, and the final section's argument about suffering and suicide is conducted between two men who both have a case.
Best for readers who want the finest novel about the cyclical nature of civilisation the genre has produced, and one that requires no interest in science fiction to work.
Historical Context & Significance
A Canticle for Leibowitz won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and has never gone out of print.
Walter M. Miller Jr. flew more than fifty combat missions as a radio operator and tail gunner in the Second World War, including the bombing that destroyed the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, founded in the sixth century. He converted to Catholicism afterwards, and the novel of monks preserving learning through a dark age comes directly out of having helped destroy a monastery that had done exactly that.
He assembled it from three novellas published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1955 and 1957. He published no further novel in his lifetime, suffered from depression and post traumatic stress, and died in 1996. A sequel he left unfinished was completed by Terry Bisson.