A Song for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Bantam Books, 0553379267, $ 12.95
Set more than a thousand years in the future, as the world slowly recovers from the devastation following nuclear war, Walter Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz focuses on the renewal of faith in a world without faith. Surviving in the deserts of the western United States, the monks of St. Leibowitz struggle to reconstruct their history and that of Christianity in the hope that history will not repeat itself and further destroy civilization. A seemingly immortal old man, believed to have been resurrected by Christ, is on guard over his efforts and is awaiting his return.
As a novel, Canticle is unique in the way that it shows that the Christian faith is not necessarily out of place within the science fiction genre: Miller paints a Catholic precursor to the Mad Max films, where man survives through sustained knowledge. . People unfamiliar with the Catholic faith may be a bit put off by the somewhat abrupt depictions of the succession of abbots who oversee daily monastic life, others may laugh at scenes in which excitement stems from the discovery of a list. real shopping that her parents left behind. patron saint, not to mention the seemingly archaic use of Latin among monks (Miller wrote the canticle before Vatican II, when Latin was still prevalent in worship. One can only assume that Miller, although the Latin Mass would always be the norm ).
Nonetheless, A Canticle for Leibowitz contains a message that still rings true thirty years after its initial publication: that with faith there is always hope for the future, even when everything seems dark.
