My Favorite Book Growing Up

The only novel Walter Miller wrote, A Canticle for Leibowitz, was written in the late 1950’s and is a fascinating science fiction tale for today. Human life hangs on after what Time Magazine in the 1960s called “a kind of post-human lunar landscape of disaster” and panned the book.

The story is easy to read and divided into three sections, taking place in three different time periods. The first, North America circa 2600 is the new Dark Ages peopled by normals, DNA-damaged human monsters and terrorist nomadic groups of the plains. Almost all knowledge has been destroyed/deleted soon after the atomic holocaust. However, The Church, the government of the time, has a desert outpost, the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, named for an engineer holocaust survivor who collected and saved documents and encouraged others to do the same.  

The abbey’s monks’ sole purpose is to recopy and maintain the documents, which include a grocery list and blueprints with squiggles and formulas they cannot begin to understand. The story progresses in 500-600 year increments as the world rediscovers the knowledge that led to the first apocalypse. Will the man destroy himself once again? Or has man learned a lesson?  No spoilers here.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is not only considered a Catholic classic but is also one of the greatest novels in the entire science fiction genre. Before he died, Miller started a sequel but someone else finished it. As a writer, I believe he could have written at least a trilogy with this incredible premise.  If you like chilling science fiction, you will enjoy this book. And it’ll make you think.