A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller’s acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed St Leibowitz, that reads: “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels–bring home for Emma.” To the Brothers of St Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness & ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959’s A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat & implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological & religious implications of the cyclical rise & fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections–Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light) & Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)–Canticle is steeped in Catholicism & Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how & why a person is canonized.–Paul Hughes