After reading Earth Abides and gushing about it with kleinbl00, he suggested I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr.
Story Overview
Post-apocalyptic Utah. The nuclear holocaust was so long ago, and the resulting chaos so destructive, that technology is largely forgotten, and people are living in the Dark Ages.
Except this one religious order, established hastily at the end of the holocaust/war, with the goal of preserving technology, books, and written wisdom for some future generation.
So our little monk at the center of our story discovers some more technology writing (wiring diagrams), which the scriveners at the monastery add to their library of writings to reproduce and illuminate. (Like the monks of the dark ages, saving texts by endlessly rewriting them, as the old ones deteriorated, prior to the advent of the printing press.)
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Jump-cut 500 years into the future of this monastic order of Leibowitz. Still preserving ancient documents, in an era that is roughly parallel to the transitional period where civilization moved from the agrarian tribal Saxon/Nordic model, to the Renaissance.
The Order of Leibowitz is still doing its work. But the amount of rediscovered materials has increased, and the "natural sciences" are on the rise. Monks start doing experiments. Electricity is discovered.
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Jump cut to a thousand years in the future. Mankind is interplanetary. The Order of Leibowitz is still doing its work. But the political structure of the Earth is unraveling. There is a serious chance of the annihilation of all life on Earth, so the Order of Leibowitz equips a secret crew of priests and bishops on a secret ship, and plans to lob them into space to protect the Order from the impending end of all life on Earth.
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The End.
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My Review
I really have a Serious Issue with religion in all its forms. I won't get in to that here, but the fact that this entire book follows a monastic order is a big conceptual hurdle for me to overcome.
And the story is essentially an analog of the story of the Roman Catholic church, from the time of Christ to the modern day. So for several hundred pages, I was immersed in the worst of religions, as it grew in influence and idiocy over roughly two thousand years.
So it's probably no surprise that it was always foremost in my mind that I really didn't like any of these characters. They were dogmatic and dedicated to ancient and irrelevant religious rites, beliefs, and processes.
The only character I could connect with was Hannigan, who was just basically Ceasar.
So things did not start off well. And then, story-wise, went downhill from there.
There is a recurring character of an old wanderer, who reappears in each age, tests one of the monks of the Order of Leibowitz, shakes his head, and says, "Nope. He's not The One, either."
Clearly this man is the one who is anointed by God as the one who will tell us when the True Jesu... erm... Leibowitz has risen/returned!
... and then he disappears from the story, never to return. This immortal, who appears in each part of history like some Comte St. Germain, and has scenes and pages of discussion all about him, and what he means... simply poofs out of the story, and is never mentioned again.
Because the book takes place in three different eras over 2000 years, there is a lead character in each section, who we follow and experience the world through their eyes. From the lowly initiate at th beginning, to the learned traveling monk in the middle, to the Abbot of the Order of Leibowitz at the end, our lead character gives us different views of the order and the world, as the timeframe changes.
One of the most significant characters in the book - a farmer-woman street vendor, who (due to radiation poisoning) has grown two heads - appears in the third era of the story.
Her particular disfigurement, and relationship with the Abbot, are clearly an analogy for ... well ... something. She is generous, and kind, and deferential to the Abbot, but also very insistent and dedicated to her religious beliefs. Interactions with her cause the Abbot to return to the roots of his belief and question why God has made her, and why God has put her in the Abbot's path? What is God trying to tell him?
Well, we never find out. The Abbot gets crushed and dies slowly under a collapsed wall. The two-headed woman has an episode... and the inert malformed "baby head" on her shoulder takes over, and does... mostly nothing.
And then the priests take off in their rocket to continue their Abbey in space.
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The Takeaway
Hugo-award winning. Lauded by generations of sci-fi readers and writers as a visionary, comic, and cutting look at humanity...
... and all I get from it is the feeling, "Jesus Christ I hope their rocket blows up on the pad, so they don't bring their religious bullshit and nuclear weapons technology to other civilizations and habitats in space. The human race should die with them. Let other evolved creatures have a crack at it, because these people have failed."
And, in the end, maybe that's what I was supposed to get out of it. I have no idea.
And I want to hear from others who have read it. Did I miss something? Is my lack of knowledge of religion preventing me from "seeing" the witty and insightful nature of this story?
Because I definitely did not get much out of it. And I wanna know why.
Yes and not really. Rather than a lack of knowledge of religion, I think your preconceived notions/issues with religion caused you to miss things. After all, you critcize the religious orders for "growing in influence and idiocy," despite their being the only reason technology survives the anti-scientific pograms that took place shortly after the nuclear war (both of which are prior to the book's beginning). So to me, your forcing this arbitrary distinction between science and religion led you to miss a lot. In particular, you seemed to have missed what was, to me, the main point of the book. The story being structured the way it is shows the cyclical nature of humanity, and how technology doesn't truly change us. Every time, the cycle ends by violence. But note that the violence is usually borne of ignorance: the aforementioned anti-science pogroms; the raider who kills Francis at the end of the first section is too mutated to even really understand what's going on; Hannegan goes war-ing just as technology is really starting to come back; the two nation-states then do the same thing and manage to fuck up a prosperous society. Meanwhile, when the Abbott dies at the end, he sees a skull from the Abbey's crypt with an arrow through it, presumably Francis from the first section. As for the Abbot/two-headed woman thing, I think this ties into the other overall theme, which counterpoints the first, namely that despite the violence and ignorance, some people will keep trying to move forward. The Order of Leibowitz survives for over 1,000 years, and if they're the reason the world has nukes again, they're also the reason the world has antibiotics again. In each order there are people striving for something greater than themselves, and to make their world a better place. So that's part of the cycle too.Did I miss something? Is my lack of knowledge of religion preventing me from "seeing" the witty and insightful nature of this story?
Thanks for digging in to this with me. So, I got the cyclical idea pretty early on. Leibowitz himself is basically in the 1950's when the atomic war happens. He's just a dude who is lionized by later generations with little information to go on, just like Jesus. The Order maintains the scraps of technology (the Memorabilia) so the cycle simply repeats again - from Christ to atomic annihilation, and from Leibowitz to atomic annihilation - and starts to repeat again, as the remnants of the order launch into space, having learned nothing from this repeating cycle, and continuing to believe that their maintenance of the Memorabilia is a service to mankind... rather than the recipe for mankind's eventual demise. (Again.) Great. Humankind can't be trusted with technology. Got it. And the reason this knowledge is available, is because the Order of Leibowitz faithfully collects and maintains it. Got it. The Order is essentially the enabler of man's downfall, by doing the one thing they do: maintain a library of the Memorabilia. So what? That "cycle" story seems like a 1500 word blog post. Not a several hundred page book. Especially when key, fascinating characters - Thon Taddeo, Benjamin/Lazarus, the Abbot, the tomato-selling woman, and even Hannigan - are fleshed out... and then summarily abandoned. (Although you are right... the arrow in the skull at the end does provide a modicum of closure.) When I stand back, and look at the sweep of the story, I see the basic idea that man is the architect of his own demise, but ... is that all there is? There's no wisdom? No lesson to learn? No alternate path suggested that could lead to a different conclusion? What if, as they boarded the spacecraft, he sees the land and people being destroyed by atomic war, and realizes THIS is the Fire Deluge that also killed Leibowitz... and he looks at the microfiche of the Memorabilia in his hands... and drops it into the fire, steps into the rocket, and ... they take off? He hits the self-destruct button on the rocket, in an attempt to end man's cycle of failure? Hm. Again, thanks for digging in with me. I appreciate it. This book is going to stick with me for a while, but not for the reasons I thought...
I still can't help but feel like you went into it with your issues with religion leading the way, with the result that every possible interpretation led in a single direction. As I said, I think there's a lot more to it than that. I'll add one more thing, and this coincides with something that's been on my mind lately. I think the book is also asking a serious question about why people choose to be virtuous when they know that plenty of others won't.
Maybe? I'll admit that the story sounds relatively superficial. It sounds like though, that you're kind of frustrated that The Abbot meets an abrupt end before "finding an answer." I have a reply kind of focused around that frustration, but it's a bit of a tangent. Would you mind if I shared?Did I miss something? Is my lack of knowledge of religion preventing me from "seeing" the witty and insightful nature of this story?
Um, if it's alright with you, I wrote a tangent last night and then edited it and then it became a bit of a tangent and now it kind of doesn't fit. So, I'm kind of thinking of cleaning it up, getting some quotations, and making a thread out of it. If I finish it, and if you want, I can give you a shout out so you know when it's posted? In the mean time, have you ever heard of a man named Wilfred Cantwell Smith? He wrote a book called The Meaning and End of Religion in which he argues a lot of things. I can’t speak to it personally, as it’s on my reading list and I'm trying to get a copy of it, but from what I’ve heard of him and the book, it sounds like he has some interesting things to say, and I think he might approach the subject from some angles you'd appreciate.
If you read A Modest Proposal as straight literature you're going to be outraged. If, on the other hand, you read it as an allegorical condemnation of the lack of charity in Early Modern England... A Canticle for Liebowitz is a meditation on humanity's interlocking regard for technology and religion. I recommended it because that was a theme you explicitly asked to explore. Your other choice, I guess, is the Foundation trilogy, arguably Asimov's masterwork, and therefore mediocre at best. fight me
I do need to dig in to Foundation. That's for sure. And read the books of The Expanse. It's a bit of a new genre for me, so I am gingerly dipping my toes in here and there, and seeing how the water feels in different areas. Earth Abides was such a brain-bending pleasure for me, that I think my expectations may be a tad overblown. It is possible that - at the time (1959) - Canticle was far more ground-breaking than it is today. I also got some more perspective on it from reading about the author, and his personal revelations he experienced writing it. It is a very personal story for him, and he didn't even realize what he was processing by writing it. (BTW - No shade for recommending it. I appreciate it, and am glad I read it! I just posted here instead of a private email to you, to open up the conversation to other interesting Hubskites.)
The three core stories were written in '55, '56 and '57. That's basically the height of the Hollywood Blacklist and the year before the John Birch Society was formed. It's 4 years after the Knights of Columbus got "Under God" added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Now? Now Monty Python's Life of Brian is pushing 40 and Dawkins has sold 3 million copies of The God Delusion. I'm woefully unimpressed with Asimov. If I could recommend one piece of sci fi?It is possible that - at the time (1959) - Canticle was far more ground-breaking than it is today.