A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Novel of Faith, Hope, and Survival

JP: Split over 3 periods in time I thought it started off well but tapers off towards the end. Still enjoyable enough and would recomend

United Kingdom on Nov 13, 2023

Amazon Customer: This is three linked short stories, set hundreds of years apart. The first is surprisingly funny, the second hopeful and a little disturbing, and the third is philosophical mainly.

Despite this, they are very coherent as a single book and I didn't find myself having to get back into each new tale as it began.

Certainly it has aged somewhat in terms of the tech of the 'lost' civilisation, given it is presumed to have fallen in the early 60s when this was published.

Equally, Miller's view on humanity is not a hugely hopeful one. He sees us as doomed and like to regress to barbarity at the slightest opportunity. I don't really share this view but obviously it bears some consideration!

United Kingdom on Oct 24, 2023

Furtlefinch: Full of great, memorable ideas, but the reader has to work for them. You are contending with a style not unlike The Naked Lunch. There is a term for it, where the author writes, cuts up the paper, then reassembles it at random. Someofthis is like that. Some is also like Ulysses, and hard to follow. But read it slowly and in pieces, and you may get something out of it.
The start is superb, by the way, and is obviously written by a very competent author. But the story doesn’t develop all the threads from the start, which is a pity. After the first change of scene away from the desert, though, it deteriorates, and I suspect the imaginative parts come from one or several hallucinogens (I’ve not read any reviews or summaries, so apologies if this is obvious).
But it’s a classic for its ideas, not its writing style, so worth having a go at, maybe in a class with other students.

United Kingdom on Aug 24, 2023

Peer Sylvester: Viele SF-Bücher aus der "golden Age" sind nicht gut gealtert. Insofern war ich etwas vorsichtig, dieses Buch noch einmal (nach 30 Jahren oder so) zu lesen. Tatsächlich ist das Bucch zeitlos gut. Ja, man merkt an manchen Stellen dass das Buch älter ist, doch es fühlt sich nicht überaltert an. Die Themen des Buches - die Gefahr des Atomkrieges, die Streitereien, die Bedeutung der Kirche - sind immer noch aktuell. Die drei Geschichten, aus denen das Buch zusammengesetzt ist, sind immer noch spannend, der leicht augenzwinkernde Stil lädt zum Durchlesen ein, können aber nicht täuschen, dass hier keine Wohlfühlliteratur vorliegt. Ich wei nicht, warum an Schulen immer nur die Physiker gelesen werden und niemals Leibowitz, denn diese beiden Werke sind mindestens ebenbürtig.

Germany on Aug 04, 2023

Ray F: Human civilizations rise and fall over millenia like birth-deaths in some radioactive imitation of reincarnation. Faith in God, preserved by the Catholic Church, is the surviving thread that keeps people going. Such is the premise of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

A STORY OF CYCLIC FALLS

The story, first published in 1959, opens in our near-future (relative to 1959—around 1980 or so), and covers a stretch of about eighteen hundred years. It is written in three acts, each entitled in Latin. In fact, there is a lot of Latin used in this book, along with Catholic conventions and ideas. The author, Walter M. Miller Jr., was a convert to Catholicism after serving in World War II. Knowing Latin or Catholicism, however, is not necessary to understanding the story, though either would probably help.

The first act is set in the Utah desert in a roughly medieval-level world. Brother Francis, a monk of the Leibowitz Abbey, is fasting in solitude for Lent in a rocky outcropping close to the abbey. Enough tropes from post-apocalyptic science fiction are spread around to orient the reader as to time and place. These include familiar place names used with unfamiliar...

United States on Aug 24, 2020

Olly Buxton: A fascinating book, A Canticle for Leibowitz is both a rich treasure of fine writing and a difficult assignment: in many ways, as a conventional novel, and even as a science fiction one, it fails on many levels.

But isn't that the case for many great works of literature (and almost all good science fiction): the real stuff eschews formula, defies convention, evades compartmentalisation - it succeeds despite itself. And so, Walter Miller's great novel is uneven, ignores conventions and defies genres.

It starts as a low, ticklish farce: in a post-apocalyptic wilderness a credulous novice monk stumbles upon some papers, including an old shopping list, in the rubble of a bombed out building. Being credulous, he proceeds to venerate them as the sacred relics of the long dead, and martyred, founder of his order. This martyr, we less-credulous readers quickly deduce, was an apparently irreligious Jewish scientist (his name, Isaac Leibowitz, being the dead giveaway) of the late Twentieth Century, alive just prior to the "Flame Deluge" (yet another genre, by the way, that this novel fits rather uncomfortably within is "post apocalyptic fiction") and dead not long after...

United Kingdom on Sep 10, 2010

Smith's Rock: If science fiction fans had an organization equivalent to Gideons International, dedicated to disseminating the sacred texts of the genre along the traffic lanes of life, you would find a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz lying next to the Gideons Bible every time you slid open the night stand in your motel/hotel room. It would be stamped AOL (Abbey of the Order of Leibowitz), and it would be a call to the faithful, a reminder of just how good sci-fi CAN be, when brilliant wordsmithing, sophisticated humor, and an excellent tale are couched in richly layered philosophy and theology.

The tale itself is bi-apocalyptic, in and of itself filling a very sparsely populated niche. Beginning with Francis, a young applicant to the Brotherhood of the Order of Leibowitz, fasting and praying in the post nuclear war ruins of what had 600 years earlier been the United States, and subsequently stumbling upon an intact fallout shelter, a story spanning many centuries unfurls. Technology reawakens, Lucifer in nuclear form begins once more to stalk the earth.

William Miller Jr. published his only novel (the sequel to Canticle was not written by Miller) in 1959. The date is important...

United States on Sep 10, 2009