Thanks to guest author Jennifer Yap, Writer in Sculpture & Ceramics at Suite101.com
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A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic that has flown under the radar of mainstream science fiction for too long. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961, this masterpiece is widely taught in university. Imitated and echoed in stories such as Planet of the Apes and The Chrysalids, the novel remains inimitable in its prescience and compassion for humanity’s immense potential as well as for our tragic flaws.
However, any straw poll of science fiction buffs will likely be met by some blank stares. This is not surprising given that the book is the one and only novel of Walter M. Miller. It is also perhaps the only science fiction title ever to draw heavily on religion, especially on traditional Catholic liturgy, for its lush texture, philosophical framework and outlook on human morality.
Published in the shadow of the Cold War, A Canticle for Leibowitz offers a contemporary, provocative and bitter-sweet chronicle of the march of progress in a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic world populated by cannibalistic mutants and illiterate people living in a society that initially parallels Europe’s Dark Ages.
The novel opens against the achievements of the Blessed Leibowitz, an engineer in the US military who converted to Catholicism after Western civilization was destroyed in the Flame Deluge. Under the protection of the church, Leibowitz saved documents and intellectuals from the mobs in the ensuing Simplification period who violently vented their frustration and anger on knowledge, learning and anyone who could read. He was eventually caught and killed.
Six hundreds years later, a monastery in the deserts of Utah doggedly follows the path of the martyred Leibowitz, preserving all scraps of unintelligible information in the hope that they may aid in the eventual rebuilding of civilization. When Brother Francis stumbles upon a ruined nuclear shelter that appears connected to the Blessed Leibowitz, he hurries the fledgling new civilization along the same path as its predecessor.
Readers watch as this civilization replays key moments of achievement and folly, and are led to consider the destructive potential of advances which we assume are benign such as writing and mathematics, the invention of the printing press and the light bulb.
Walter M. Miller started a second novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which is set in this same world. It was finished by Terry Bisson after Miller’s suicide in 1996 at the age of seventy-four.
