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On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI read this book when I was a teenager simply because the title sounded cool. I was in for a real surprise - it blew me away. Memories. I don’t get that feeling often when reading any more - maybe age, maybe rarity of the books quality.
- robbiep 4y agoA book recommendation for anyone who enjoyed Canticle: ‘Radio Life’ by Derek Miller
- tablespoon 4y ago> If the failure by “A Canticle for Leibowitz” to predict the nuclear holocaust tells us anything, it’s that this is indeed possible. The nuclear holocaust wasn't really a prediction of that book; it was a premise.
- _jal 4y agoThe book itself is the prediction.
- tablespoon 4y ago> The book itself is the prediction. The book itself is literature. To see it as a prediction and especially as a failed prediction seems simpleminded (in the techie-futurist way).
- _jal 4y ago(A) I don't see it as a failed prediction, that's the author's view. Me, I think history is a long time compared to the time we've lived with WMD. (B) The type of literature in question is called an allegory. To see an allegory as a prediction is... aligned with why people write them. I wouldn't call picking the wrong definition to support an argument simpleminded; perhaps friction-seeking would be a good term.
- westward 4y agoIt's a poorly constructed sentence (and unfortunately the last, intended to inspire hope).
- bslorence 4y agoYeah I think Miller was using the nuclear holocaust as a vehicle to reflect on original sin (i.e., the inevitable tendency of human beings to engage in self-destructive behavior) and the antidote to it offered by the Catholic Church. If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.
- tablespoon 4y ago> If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice. Maybe last year, but we're back to nuclear sabre-rattling and great-power conflict now.
- andrewmutz 4y agoMost of what you read on the news and social media would have you convinced that civilization is declining or collapsing. If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy). What does this mean? Why the difference between the measurable state of the world and the doomer discourse? I think its rooted in two things. The first reason is that both social media and news media are monetized by your attention, and attention is far higher when things are presented as terrible than when things are presented as good. Bad news goes viral far better than good news. The second reason is that being highly online is correlated with depression. The people who are most likely to be spending their time posting online are more likely to be depressed and lose perspective about the world around them. What's the solution? I don't know for sure but I think a good first step is to limit the time you spend consuming news media and social media, and instead spend time offline living life. What's the point of a constant stream of information if it leads to inaccurate perceptions of the world?
- lisper 4y ago> two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy "Notable" is quite the understatement IMHO.
- cableshaft 4y ago> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy). Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put off kids because they care about overpopulation), or topsoil availability, or fresh water availability (climate change contributes but we're also using way too much), or garbage in the ocean, or the decimation of life in the ocean (which climate change isn't helping but it's more from overfishing), etc etc etc. That's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure I can hunt down a lot more. And it's super dependent on where you live too. Try telling Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, Syrians, Yemenis, Lebanese, etc. if they're better off now than they were in the past.
- ASlave2Gravity 4y agoEasily one of my favourite novels. It's riddled with beauty; there is a lens held up to the shepherding of knowledge that made me really appreciate what it means to be a scholar. It's a wild ride and I think a book people should read. My fav quote, "When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.”
- a_e_k 4y agoDefinitely one of my favorites, too. There's an elegiac quality to it that I haven't quite seen in any other novel. I have a number of quotations jotted down from it, but since this a tech site I'll restrict myself to sharing this one that I sometimes think of when dealing with a recalcitrant machine or mysterious bug: "That contraption--listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a 'thinking machine'--man-made--be a rational soul? Blah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know what?" "Father?" "Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think! It knows good and evil I tell you, and it chose the later."
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago"Sell it to an atheist! No that wouldn't be kind. Sell it for scrap!"
- ASlave2Gravity 4y agoElegiac is the perfect word for it! It's a lovely quote too. I remember reading the novel and thinking, 'Holy shit, he's hit the nail on the head!' I'd happily run a class on it. Whenever anyone asks for a reading list, it's often on there. I take the novel as a mystic work, much like Meister Eckhart's works. It's a pendulum swing between the secular and the sacred.
- glennonymous 4y agoI would like to read the book and I’m sure it’s good. But whenever a character says “does it not?” I want to soak the book in gasoline and light it on fire.
- Symmetry 4y agoPeople keep complaining about "The End of History" but never for good reasons. It predicted president Trump as the sort of "megalothymia" that that might come to power in the end of history! It's just about the lack of alternative credible opposing ideologies. I still found it an incredibly disappointing book but not for any of the reasons that everybody dumps on it for.
- fennecfoxen 4y agoi don't get this perspective > Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden. like okay, those legit aren't great, but don't we face substantially bigger threats from, oh, IDK, Putin's Russia and what may yet be an ascendant China?? Maybe the way we approach these matters, as if sleepwalking, has as much to do with destruction we suffer as any overt impulses towards destruction. (Also, the people kicking Eden apart usually aren't the most-comfortable ones, but the resentful ones a few rungs down.)
- Symmetry 4y agoFukayama's perspective is a very Hegelian one. Some countries might be threatened by wars with other countries but he contends the dominant paradigm of liberal democratic capitalism doesn't have any real contenders against it and so capital H History in that sense is over. Countries might not all embrace this framework but unless large numbers of people come to embrace Putanism or Xi Jinping thought then it isn't proving anything that Fukiyama wrong. Now, I think that this is a terrible perspective to have so I didn't like the book at all. And I have other beefs with it. But the book was never claiming that countries wouldn't invade each other or that there wouldn't be terrorist attacks or that significant events like that wouldn't continue to happen.
- paulwilsondev 4y agoexactly
- ilamont 4y agoBut we didn’t blow ourselves back to the stone age in the 50s and 60s. This fate turned out to be not quite as inevitable as “A Canticle” would seem to suggest. Yet evidence pointing to this outcome was all around us during the Cold War, right up to the late 1980s. Development of new and more potent weapons. Serious accidents or near accidents - one crazy one I remember hearing about was one side almost launching a retaliatory barrage when the radar gave a false positive for an incoming attack. Proxy wars. Opaque succession plans in the USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Sabre-rattling and standoffs all over the world. In elementary school in the 1970s we didn't have to do "Duck and Cover" but we did have drills involving classes marching in a line down to the basement which had signs marking it as a "Fallout Shelter." Sometimes I still see them. (History: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/01/23/local-news/what-do-those-fallout-shelter-signs-actually-mean https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/01/23/local-news/what-do-thos...) When I got a little older, I can't tell you how unsettling it was to see serious looking people talking on the nightly news about some incident on the North Korean border, or a power struggle in Moscow after Brezhnev died, or how many thousands of ICBMs each side had pointing at each other. How fucked up is it that 15 year old me understood concepts like MIRV (https://armscontrolcenter.org/multiple-independently-targetable-reentry-vehicle-mirv/ https://armscontrolcenter.org/multiple-independently-targeta...) or the U.S. maintaining a bunch of B-52s loaded with nukes in the air at all times? The news we saw and read was reinforced through pop culture that drove home the idea that we would blow ourselves to bits. In high school in the mid-1980s we were assigned Canticle as well as Neville Shute's On The Beach, which follows a similarly depressing narrative (northern hemisphere covered by radiation, southern slowly dying off, what people do as the inevitable gets closer). Red Dawn. Firefox. Reruns of Dr. Strangelove. Or the TV series The Day After. We couldn't believe it when crowds climbed on the Berlin Wall in November 1989. That's when people were able to rub their eyes and think just maybe we weren't going to kill ourselves.
- badcppdev 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome Crazy times. 1960 - 1968 The United States flew nuclear armed bombers to the borders of the USSR 24 hours a day. Imagine if 'insert country name' flew armed bombers to the border of 'insert western country name' every day in 2022.
- JackFr 4y agoI very much enjoyed ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ when I read it, but in looking back while it was tremendous for middle school me, it doesn’t hold up. The whole “Fall of Rome/Dark Ages/Western Monasticism preserves civilization” narrative just isn’t true and is a misreading of Western history. That’s a post-hoc framing created in the late Renaissance/early modern era.
- bslorence 4y agoInteresting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?
- JackFr 4y agoWell it was a kind of hand wavy pronouncement on my part. With respect to the ‘Fall of Rome/Dark Ages’ narrative I had Pico della Mirandola and Edward Gibbon in mind. Considering their takes on monasticism, I suppose monasticism as the savior of civilization was actually a much later add on.
- bslorence 4y ago> a much later add on. Yeah that's what I was thinking too. I'm going to re-read Canticle soon-ish but I wonder to what extent Miller endorses even the latter. I feel like his concerns were much more immediately spiritual than cultural. I'm thinking particularly of the scene where the main character of whichever volume meets the Pope up-close and is taken aback to see that his garments are moth-eaten and threadbare.
- sonofhans 4y agoThis indeed is a lovely book, one of my very favorites, and one of the most influential science fiction novels written. Maybe only Vonnegut was able to match the combination of grimness and humor. Walter M Miller Jr was a Catholic, and it helps to see the book through that particular blend of hopeless original sin and joyful redemption. He, and many of his characters, believed in both. It's a sensitive portrayal of people who are deeply religious for principled reasons, yet don't fall into easy caricature. It's the only novel that he ever wrote. He published a couple dozen short stories, many of which are worth reading. Several are available here -- https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Walter%20M._Miller,%20Jr..html https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Walter%20M._Miller,%20J... His notes for a "Canticle" sequel were stitched together after his death into "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman," but that's not even a patch on the original. Terry Bisson did much of the work, and I'm sure it was hard. Where "Canticle" is humane and sharp and focused, "Wild Horse Woman" is perfunctory and scattered and meandering.
- shusaku 4y ago> Walter M Miller Jr was a Catholic On that note, I couldn’t help but read the book as a critique of the Protestant reformation.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoNot saying you're necessarily wrong, but... why? What in the book points you to that conclusion?
- sweettea 4y agoIndeed,for basically this reason the book was a large influence in my conversion to Catholicism, viewing it as more able to keep knowledge preserved than the Reformed Protestantism of my upbringing.
- ghaff 4y agoWhen I put together a favorite short stories list in SF, I cheated a bit by making "Fiat Homo" (which is the first part of the re-worked novel) one of them. But it's one of the great books.
- skmurphy 4y agoMy vote for best quote from the book “Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. ‘You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'”
- gottebp 4y agoIt is so realistic too. I know a Prior (similar to an Abbot) who speaks exactly like this at times.
- skmurphy 4y agoRelated “Never tell a child you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body. As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.” George Macdonald 1892 ("Friends" here is a reference to Quakers) via https://books.google.com/books?id=vDMrAAAAYAAJ&dq=george+macdonald+1892+british+friend&pg=PA157&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=vDMrAAAAYAAJ&dq=george+mac... h/t https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-have-a-soul-cs-lewis-never-said-it/ https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-have-a-soul-cs-lewis-neve...
- xoxxala 4y agoIn the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites. A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).
- jboggan 4y agoThat's amazing, thank you for creating that. Some of my favorite parts of the Fallout series were the little slices of frozen catastrophe hidden off in corners, piles of bones and old clothing and a suitcase full of items that told half a story. I read that book after I had played Fallout and it felt so familiar because of it.
- drewzero1 4y agoI've been reading it recently for the first time and it didn't quite click that it was an influence on Fallout, but it makes a lot of sense. I realize I've been kind of imagining scenes from FO3 while reading. (Though I understand we're talking about Fallout 1 and 2 here, and the further games were made by different people.)
- tpoacher 4y agoThank you for City of Lost Children. Just ... thank you :)
- aatharuv 4y agoI believe that Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" was also a major influence behind it.
- thegagne 4y agoI really enjoyed the book. I’m almost always down for some sci-fi dystopia, and as a religious person I enjoyed this particular lens on it. A couple I highly recommend from another Catholic author, The Lord of the World, and Dawn of All, by Robert Hugh Benson. Those two are more early 20th century Catholicism in worldview, which I particularly enjoyed.
- bslorence 4y agoI could not get into Lord of the World although I really enjoyed another novel of Benson's.
- Thorentis 4y agoNot quite a dystopia, but of you (like me) also loved those books, then a highly recommend CS Lewis' Space Trilogy. One of my favourite series of all time, especially the last one.
- burnished 4y agoYou ever read 'Too Like the Lightning'? Its really good. One of the things going on through the series is basically "what if a bunch of atheists found compelling yet questionable evidence of a miracle".
- Thorentis 4y agoA wonderful book, one of my favourites. This intersection of science, religion, dystopia, raw humanity - it makes for an enthralling reading experience.
- andrewstuart 4y agoI tried reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz” recently. Didn't love it. Not alot really happened in it. It felt like a response/commentary to the sort of apocalypse that was envisaged in the 1980's, like nuclear war. I feel like there's a much more sophisticated post apocalyptic vision of the future now. As an alternative, I loved "The Road" - now there's a really great post apocalyptic scifi.
- LanceH 4y agoThe book is about faith, the apocalypse is what is testing it.
- the_af 4y agoI really didn't like The Road. Felt like bleakness for bleakness' sake, a kind of "pessimism porn". Maybe I just didn't understand it.
- tablespoon 4y ago> I really didn't like The Road. Felt like bleakness for bleakness' sake, a kind of "pessimism porn". Maybe I just didn't understand it. I the book Capitalist Realism recently, and it had an interesting section that observed modern society tends to confuse bleakness and depravity with "being realistic."
- UncleOxidant 4y ago" Maybe being happy with the current state of things is just hard. Maybe actually maintaining a good, stable society is hard too; harder than expecting what worked yesterday to work for us now. I don’t want to minimize or ignore that there are very real problems with the current state of things, and trying to improve them is a good idea, but current political appetites feel decidedly destructive." Agreed. Things aren't actually all that bad right now. When compared to most of history things are really pretty damn good. Sure there's the pandemic, but as pandemics go... well, there have been much worse. And yet a lot of people want to see it all burn. I really don't understand this sentiment. What makes them think that something better will arise out of the ashes?
- origin_path 4y agoIf you ever find yourself genuinely unable to understand the views of large groups of people, that's usually a good sign to take a step back and try to approach the subject more dispassionately. People are usually pretty rational on close inspection. They just operate under different premises and experiences. This article is pretty typical of the genre "unhappy leftists ask why people inexplicably reject their utopia". As per usual no real political analysis is provided, just the cleverly worded implication that people who disagree with the preferred direction don't really have political views, just atavistic destructive tendencies. That they want to "watch it all burn". It's flattering to the ego to believe that other people are just vastly intellectually inferior, of course, but not very intellectually interesting for observers. To wit, the core of the author's thesis is that with the threat of nuclear war receding, "Capitalism and liberal democracy had won, and nothing would ever really challenge this staus quo again. That thesis has now unraveled so obviously that nobody claims we are at the “end of history” anymore, and this book is remarkable only for the hubris it embodied. Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden." This sounds clever but is devoid of any meaning or detail. It's a New York Times cliché, not actual analysis of the world you could learn anything from. And because it's so thin we can easily spin it around. Consider Trump. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is about a world post-nuclear apocalypse. Trump is cast as somehow equivalent or similar to this. But let us recall the alternative voters were given! I remember the original presidential debates, and it was Trump's opponent who wanted to create a no-fly zone over Syria i.e. start a hot war with the nuclear armed Russians! And it was Trump who stood against that and said no way, we're not doing that, we're not starting a hot war with Russia over Syria. So you could argue that the voters stood up for Eden in that moment by saying: no, getting the first woman president is not enough to offset the risk of nuclear war. A serious analysis that linked A Canticle with modern political events should really consider that sort of thing, but this article isn't such an analysis. It's instead the usual cry of pain of those committed to unaccountable managerial technocratism, wondering why the savages inexplicably reject their benevolent rule.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoAn excellent 1981 radio production of 'Canticle' is still online. [https://archive.org/details/NPRPresentsACANTICLEFORLIEBOWITZIn15Parts https://archive.org/details/NPRPresentsACANTICLEFORLIEBOWITZ...]
- leobg 4y agoIndeed, excellent! Listening to it now. Perhaps the best dramatization of any novel I’ve ever heard. Thank you for the recommendation!
- gen220 4y agoRead this book for the first time a couple years ago (before COVID). My memory of it is admittedly hazy, but I recall it putting me in a pretty gloomy place, emotionally. The premise of the book is that technological progress coupled with original sin means humanity is doomed to endlessly repeat genocide against itself and the Earth. In other words, we have this hardware-level bug that bubbles to the surface every couple of generations, and the undercurrent of technological progress means that each time it pops there's more technology to put to work against the "other" (also known as "the self", in a broader context). It's hard to look at these ingredients and not agree that the extrapolated recipe is as likely as it is disturbing. I disagree with the author of this post, in that "kicking" is a very rational response for many people, especially today. The comfort of the author's Eden is paid for by the regrettable suffering of so many people; and they have very few political avenues express it through. Those people are entitled to kick. Wealth and comfort ought to be distributed at a higher pace that isn't so dependent on GDP growth. I'm optimistic, I think there's enough wealth in the world to solve these problems. But the stickiness of greed around wealth means it'll take some kicking to get us there.
- Orkocom 4y agoWhy is your name green @fromwilliam?
- teddyh 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html “Green indicates a new account.”
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI read this via this SF Masterworks series and I've enjoyed most that I've picked up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks Richard Mathesson books are good, I think I am Legend is the one I read first and then started looking out for others in this series. Swastika Night was probably the most mind-blowing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_Night https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_Night
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI think it's simply that when things are bad, It's easy to know what to, what the immediate goal should be, easy to agree what's wrong and what would be better. When things are not so bad, it's not as clear what is still wrong and what would be progress, and everyone disagrees and those disagreements become the new worst thing.
- paulwilsondev 4y agomRNA