A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)

WRITTEN BY Walter M. Miller Jr.

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN USA

A Canticle for Leibowitz is an apocalyptic classic that still ranks high on many sci-fi hit lists. Its intricate story spans thousands of years and is told in three sections. The first part, “Fiat Homo” (Let There Be Man), is set in a new dark ages, six hundred years after a nuclear war (known as the Flame Deluge) had destroyed most of civilization in the early 1960s. The world is now overtaken by beasts and criminals. Anyone with knowledge of the old world (doctors, scientists, teachers, etc.) is scorned and even killed in the Simplification—a huge backlash against intellect and knowledge. The church has become one of the only places left where knowledge is collected and celebrated.

The rare intellectuals of this society often speak of an iconic hero named Isaac Edward Leibowitz—a “booklegger” from after the nuclear war who had risked his life to smuggle books to safety. At some point he was caught and killed, and a monastery called the Albertian Order of Leibowitz in the Southwestern US desert is now trying to make him a saint. We eventually learn that Leibowitz was a Jewish physicist (and later a priest) who saved not just books but grocery lists, lottery tickets, and drawings with the intention of passing them down to future generations.

More Books Written By Walter M. Miller Jr.

Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman
(novel, finished by Terry Bisson; 1997)

“Death of a Spaceman” (short story, 1954)

“Six and Ten Are Johnny” (short story, 1952)

UNFORGETTABLE MOMENT

In the first part of the book, Brother Francis Gerard is on a vigil in the desert when he comes across a wanderer. The wanderer helps him find a rock to use to build a shelter, but as he picks up the rock, Brother Francis notices that beneath it is an entrance to an ancient fallout shelter, where he finds a stash of old handwritten notes and cryptic texts on old memo pads. These notes seem to have been written by Leibowitz, his order's original founder.

The second part of the book, “Fiat Lux” (Let There Be Light), takes the reader to another future time period in which science and technology are booming again, and electricity has been reinvented. This new era is embodied in the confident scientist Thon Taddeo; meanwhile Dom Paolo, a monk, doubts these new technological inventions and tries to maintain the sanctity of his faith.

EALITY FACTOR

A Canticle for Leibowitz, at its heart, is a story about how history repeats itself when people fail to learn from it. And if you look at the rise and fall of civilizations, or the thousands of years of war in human history, it's easy to see that the causes for the apocalypse in A Canticle for Leibowitz are fairly realistic.

In the book's last section, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” (Thy Will Be Done), the world is again drifting toward a nuclear war. The Order of Leibowitz has lost most of its power, but it readies a spaceship to send a group of clergy and children into space to escape the impending nuclear catastrophe and build a new life on another planet.

The Inspiration

Author Walter M. Miller Jr. enlisted in the US Army Air Forces shortly after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, and he spent much of World War II in Italy and the Balkans as a radioman and tail gunner on B-25 bombers. On one of these Italian missions, he participated in the destruction of one of the oldest monasteries in the Western world—Italy's Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of Montecassino. On February 15, 1944, the monastery was destroyed by American bombers. The attack was based on a fear that the abbey was being used as a lookout for the German defenders, but a later investigation proved that it was a refugee shelter and that the only people who had been killed in the bombing were innocent civilians. The whole thing was a traumatic experience for Miller, and in 1947 he converted to Catholicism in part because of this experience.

The Impact

• A Canticle for Leibowitz is considered a sci-fi classic. It has never been out of print since it was first published, and received the Hugo Award (a prestigious science fiction prize) in 1961 as the best novel.

• The book lived on in other formats. A fifteen-part radio serial was adapted and broadcast on NPR in 1981, and in 1993, BBC Radio broadcasted a dramatization of the first two books, “Fiat Homo” and “Fiat Lux.”

QUOTABLES

“Because if a man is ignorant of the fact that something is wrong, and acts in ignorance, he incurs no guilt, provided natural reason was not enough to show him that it was wrong. But while ignorance may excuse the man, it does not excuse the act, which is wrong in itself.”

The abbot of the St. Leibowitz monastery, talking to a doctor about the “mercy camps” (crematoria set up to dispose of radiation victims)