A Canticle for Leibowitz

Tremendous.

This was a reread, sort of. It was assigned reading in high school courtesy of a teacher I appreciated a good deal at the time and have come to appreciate more as I've grown older. (The same teacher also introduced me to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.) I didn't appreciate Canticle at the time, though, and I didn't really understand it at all. I decided to give it a reread again when it was featured in the Something Awful Book Club, and I'm glad I did. It has been considered a classic for years, published in the early '60s and honored with a Hugo award, and is one of that rare breed of at least nominally science fiction novels that Serious People deign to deem “literature.”

It's hard to know what to write about Canticle to convey useful information without impinging on the reader's experience. I don't want to talk too much about themes, because in this case I think it's important for new readers to draw them out themselves. It concerns three ages, all of them well after what the characters know as the “Flame Deluge”: nuclear apocalypse. Knowledge itself is widely reviled in most corners of the world, blamed for the destruction of the world, and anarchy is widespread. Those bringing order are more concerned with force and power. In a few corners, however, knowledge – or more commonly, data, understood poorly or not at all – is kept alive by monks who study it diligently and seek to keep it safe.

Canticle is a marvel. Eloquently and passionately written, thought-provoking and disquieting, to me at least it offered more questions than answers. I'm glad to have this one on my shelf.