Hugo Project #3

Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. (1961 Hugo winner)

An erudite, humane novel. I really enjoyed this one for a couple of reasons. First, there is Miller's knowledgeable and relatively sympathetic rendering of the Catholic Church. The church in this book isn't perfect, but it certainly isn't the typical sinister cabal you see in many texts. Clearly, Miller knows whereof he writes.

Second, I enjoyed cyclical structure of the story where he takes us from a bleak postapocalyptic dark age to a new Renaissance to yet another blossoming of technology and its end in a second nuclear holocaust. It's a bleak ending in many ways, but it's also honest. And it keeps its own scope relatively narrow, i.e., the world of the monastery and its interactions with the outside world.

I was going to write that the whole nuclear holocaust scenario was clearly a Cold War concern that may seem a bit dated to us, but Fukuyama's "end of history" hasn't turned out as comfy-warm as we would like. Maybe it's becoming timely again. Powerful stuff.