A Canticle for Leibowitz

Centuries after the nuclear war remembered as the Flame Deluge, the survivors turned on learning itself: in the backlash called the Simplification, anyone who could read was liable to be killed by mobs who proudly called themselves Simpletons, and books were destroyed wherever they were found. Against that, the Albertian Order of Leibowitz was founded in the desert of the American Southwest to hide, copy and memorise whatever fragments of science survived — even where the monks no longer understood a word of what they were preserving.

A Canticle for Leibowitz follows that abbey through three widely separated eras. In the first, a young novice, Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, uncovers a fallout shelter holding relics of the order's founder, and the discovery sets in motion a case for his canonisation. In the second, six centuries later, Abbot Dom Paulo receives the secular scholar Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, who has come to study the abbey's Memorabilia at the moment Brother Kornhoer builds a working electric lamp — and at the moment the warlord Hannegan of Texarkana is preparing for conquest. In the third, humanity has regained spaceflight and nuclear weapons alike, and Abbot Dom Jethras Zerchi finds himself arguing over the euthanasia of hopelessly irradiated refugees while the world moves toward a second Flame Deluge.

Assembled from three novellas Miller published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1955 and 1957 and issued as a novel by J. B. Lippincott in October 1959, it won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and has remained continuously in print since. Its subject is the long argument between faith and reason, and its structure — liturgical, patient, laced with untranslated Latin and with a bleak comedy running under the grief — makes the case that memory is a form of hope even when it is not yet understood.