#a canticle for leibowitz

[smbhax]

Cover illustration by Lou Feck

Info from ISFDB

[fallout-lou-begas]

i'm reading A Canticle for Leibowitz and at the end of Chapter 3 our protagonist Brother Francis collapses from exhaustion on the desert road between his Lenten seclusion and his abbey and "It was late afternoon before [Father] Cheroki, riding back from his rounds, noticed him lying there" and I keep cackling laughing because all I can imagine is Francis in the family death pose just baking in the desert sun for hours until he's found like that

[disgruntledexplainer]

the contrast between the vibes that Tolkien and Lewis's books give off versus Miller and Benson is crazy.

[anexperimentallife]

Re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, and I remember when I read it the first time as a tween thinking, "Okay, it's kind of far-fetched that people would be so rabidly anti-knowledge, but I'll accept it for the sake of the story, " but now I look around and like, yep, Walter M. Miller was a fucking prophet.

[guccigarantine]

mhmm im worried about my boy brother Francis he does not seem long for this world

[70sscifiart]

Peter Andrew Jones’ cover to A Canticle for Leibowitz

[rga531]

The duality of men

[iampresent]

Real and actual text my friend just sent me. what do i SAY.

[johntorrington]

a canticle for leibowitz is great if you want to read about the world’s most pathetic monk for a hundred pages until he gets shot in the head

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

#two people I know have mentioned canticle for leibowitz and now I'm like damn....book of the summer...

(from OP)

I Iove saying "everyone's talking about _____ lately" when "everyone" is like two of my friends

[brothermouse-skeleton]

Just finished reading Walter M. Miller Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz" or, as I choose to call it "Atomic Catholicism"

Admittedly I don't think I know enough Latin or Catholicism to fully appreciate it, but I still think it was pretty good

[nightingaelic]

My review of the Fallout show is that the fans and everyone at Bethesda need to read A Canticle for Leibowitz and re-apply its themes to this thing they all love - Jonathan Nolan kind of gets it, but I'm pretty sure Emil Pagliarulo doesn't

[station451]

Another absolute banger by Richard Powers, this time on Walter M. Miller Jr.'s novella collection Conditionally Human. Published by Ballantine in 1962, this would have been the followup to Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.

The overall composition is a stunning use of the paperback scale (a little larger than 5x8, so slightly bigger than a postcard or a 90s Kodak photo print.) On a much larger cover, like a hardback book, it might look a little sparse, but on hardcover's smaller (and cheaper) sister, it is allowed to make a heck of a statement with its simplicity. As with many of the books in my collection, I am also drawn to the gorgeous orange and fuchsia color scheme.

[disgruntledexplainer]

one of the things i find interesting about A Canticle for Leibowitz is that even though it's a nuclear apocalypse, it really isn't. The story mentions the nuclear apocalypse occurring and millions of people dying, but that wasn't what ended human civilization as we know it. It was the people's reaction to all the destruction, the urge to lash out at anything and everything related to the creators of the bombs, including important and necessary things, which ended civilization.

the apocalypse wasn't the nukes. it was the "great simplification". the world wasn't ended by technology or by the powerful (though they certainly didn't help), but by normal everyday people who allowed themselves to be consumed by hate. it's a sobering concept, especially speaking as someone who suffers from anger issues.

[fabiansociety]

so a lot of the dna of fallout is built on a canticle for leibowitz, which was itself drawing on the loss of technological learning in europe following the collapse of the western roman empire… but that loss was geographic, not universal. classical knowledge was retained and built upon for centuries in the islamic world; the renaissance kicked off in europe because a wealth of arabic translations and commentaries on classical writers came into europe through muslim spain and the expansion and retraction of the ottoman empire. fallout has moved fairly far away from the idea of an intellectual dark age, inasmuch as it ever really had one, but it would be interesting for NCR traders or brotherhood scouts to get far enough towards South America that they encounter the thriving and advanced civilizations of venezuela, colombia, or peru. they had some bad years following the great war, sure, but they weren't primary targets the way the US was, so all the prewar technology is still there, iterated on with 200 years of further experimentation and adaptation to a world lacking in the easy extractive resources that the former great powers relied on. where the brotherhood of steel's pretensions to being keepers of knowledge isn't just self-aggrandizement, but positively quaint. power armor is suddenly as antiquated as plate mail would be to an 18th century musketeer.

[guccigarantine]

“Bless me Father I ate a lizard”