★★★★★ “I am the Immaculate Conception,” came the dream whisper.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M Miller, Jr

Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name:
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Kyrie eleison.
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Christe eleison.
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R:Kyrie eleison, eleison imas!

I read A Canticle for Leibowitz about 50 years ago. In 1975 it won the Locus Award for All-Time Best Novel -- that may have been what brought it to my attention. It was indeed very good.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a postapocalyptic novel, possibly the first I ever read (they were not so thick on the ground in the 1970s as they are now). In fact, it is both a post-apocalyptic and a pre-apocalyptic novel. We begin some centuries after the first apocalypse, which was just as a novel published in 1959 (two years after Sputnik) might imagine. The world is now a desert, and there are monsters -- the mutant fruit of nuclear fallout. There is an order of monks, the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz. They, and the Catholic Church more generally, are almost the only coherent organizations in this world. Technologies are rediscovered, and we see, as the publisher's blurb says, "the relentless progression of a human race damned by its inherent humanness to recelebrate its grand foibles and repeat its grievous mistakes."

There is an excellent surprise ending that actually surprised me -- I didn't see it coming.

Is A Canticle for Leibowitz really the best Science Fiction novel of all time? That was an easier claim to make in 1975 than it would be now. Ursula Le Guin and Roger Zelazny were still little known -- Arthur C. Clarke was well known, but his best work was still ahead of him. In hindsight, I personally might be inclined to choose The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The City and the Stars (1959), or Lord of Light (1967). Does A Canticle for Leibowitz belong in such august company? Hard to say, since I read it so long ago. I should probably read it again to find out.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is available in both of my local libraries, therefore very likely also in yours. Also, a web search will quickly find free full-text PDFs, for instance this one.

Despite liking Canticle so much, I never read anything else by Walter M. Miller Jr.. There is a sequel, and also some stories free on Project Gutenberg.

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