Preserving our Christian Heritage since 2001.
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Preserving our Christian Heritage since 2001.
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| Title: A Canticle for Leibowitz |
| Author: Miller, Walter M., Jr. |
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Format: Paperback: 352 pages |
| Publisher: Eos; Reprint edition (May 9, 2006) |
| ISBN: 0060892994 |
| Review Date: June 12th, 2007 |
| Buy this Book from Amazon.com. |
Rating: |
| Book Description: A Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction Novel from a Christian world view. |
Review:
Any body who is very familiar with the genre of Science Fiction knows that Religion is largely ignored, or displayed in an unforgiving light, by many authors. How so many people could come the the conclusion that the future would be, or even could be, so sterile of a spiritual life is beyond me. But Miller has managed to do something unusual with Canticle for Leibowitz, show religion, specifically Christianity in a positive light. Miller, a Roman Catholic, wrote many short stories for fiction magazines. This is his only full length novel he completed himself. Unfortunately, he later went insane, becoming paranoid and isolationist, even to the point he began to attack his family, friends and even the Church. His insanity finally pushing him to commit suicide. A shame because I would have liked to see more books by him.
Canticle starts out a number of years after the Flame Deluge. A large scale nuclear war that has left the world in ruins. The inhabitants of the United States now live in a Medieval style society. Christianity has survived, however, and is helping to restore order to the world. This is done by booklegging and copying manuscripts from before the war. The monks of the abbey have to smuggle books because the world went through the Simplification, a reaction by the masses against anything that resembled that world that brought the Flame Deluge upon them.
The novel is broken into three sections, a Medieval section, a Renaissance section, and a Futuristic Section. The Abbey becomes the main character that ties each section together, along with artifacts left by previous characters in the story.
One of the main themes in Canticle is that scientific progress must be accompanied by moral progress. This is shown very clearly in the second section, when scholars finally are at a point where they can begin to understand and study the manuscripts from before the Flame Deluge. However, by this point in time, the educated have begun to wonder if the stories of the Euro-American civilization are even true, with stories of thinking and flying machines. The reader is left with a bitter feeling, when the monks, who welcome the scholar to their abbey, find that he is not a Christian at all, making the event they had been longing for for centuries, feel more like a plundering of the Church.
By the third section, the Futurist section, the Church has learned from its mistakes and is no longer idle when it comes to progress. The book ends with one of the brothers of the abbey shaking the dust off his sandals as he enters into a space ship that the Church has build. The ship is to colonize other planets, taking with it the church, just as the nations of the world begin to destroy themselves again in another nuclear war.
