A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
The novel is a fix-up of three short stories Miller published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that were inspired by the author's participation in the bombing of the monastery at the Battle of Monte Cassino during World War II. The book is considered one of the classics of science fiction and has never been out of print. It won the 1961 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research. A sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was published posthumously in 1997.
Publication history
Development By 1955, Walter M. Miller Jr. had published over 30 science fiction short stories in such magazines as Astounding Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and Fantastic Adventures. Significant themes of his stories included loss of scientific knowledge or "socio-technological regression and its presumed antithesis, continued technological advance", its preservation through oral transmission, the guardianship of archives by priests, and "that side of [human] behavior which can only be termed religious". These thematic elements, combined with the growing subgenre of the "post-disaster" story and Miller's own experiences during World War II, set the stage for the short story that would become the opening section of A Canticle for Leibowitz."A Canticle for Leibowitz falls into a well-known subgenre of science fiction, the 'post-disaster' story, like John Wyndham's The Chrysalids (1955), Algis Budrys's Some Will Not Die (1961), and many more. The use of nuclear weapons to end World War II naturally set many writers speculating on the possibilities of future war, mutation, and rebirth".
During World War II, Miller served as a radioman and tail gunner in a bomber crew that participated in the destruction of the 6th-century Christian monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy, founded by St. Benedict and recognized as the oldest surviving Christian church in the Western world. This experience impressed him enough to write, a decade later, the short story "A Canticle for Leibowitz", about an order of monks whose abbey springs from the destroyed world around it. The story, which would evolve into "Fiat Homo", the first of three parts of the fix-up novel, was published in the April 1955 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF).
Although not originally intended as a serialization, the saga continued in "And the Light Is Risen", which was published in August 1956 (also in F&SF). That work would later grow into "Fiat Lux", the second part of the novel. It was while writing the third story, "The Last Canticle", for magazine publication in February of the following year that Miller realized he was really completing a novel: "Only after I had written the first two and was working on the third did it dawn on me that this isn't three novelettes, it's a novel. And I converted it".
The publication of the three "Canticle" stories,ISFDB catalogs them as a novelette and two novellas, which are defined by word counts 7,500–17,500 and 17,500–40,000, respectively; shorter and longer works are short stories and novels. along with Miller's "The Lineman", in F&SF, marked a significant evolution in the writer's craft. Under the editorship of Anthony Boucher, F&SF possessed a reputation for publishing works with "careful writing and characterization". Walker Percy considered the magazine "high-class sci-fi pulp". The appearance of these stories in the magazine is indicative of the direction Miller's writing had taken toward human' stories, less crowded with incident, more concerned with values".
A Canticle for Leibowitz was the only novel Miller published during his lifetime. For the fix-up, Miller did not just collate the three short stories. He changed the title and the names of some characters, added new characters, changed the nature and prominence of existing characters, and added Latin passages. These revisions affected the religious and recurrence themes of the story. The Latin phrases in the novel relate to Roman Catholic Church practices, rituals and official communications. Susan Olsen writes that Miller did not include the Latin phrases just to "add dignity" to the work, but to emphasize its religious themes, making it consonant with the tradition of Judeo-Christian writings.
Changing the name of the abbot of the first part from "Father Juan" to "Abbot Arkos" strengthened the cyclical/recurrence motif, since the name of the first abbot encountered, "Arkos", begins with the first letter of the Latin alphabet and the name of the last abbot, "Zerchi", begins with the last letter. Miller also expanded certain scenes, increasing their importance: for instance, the initial encounter between Brother Francis and Abbot Arkos in "Fiat Homo" grew from two pages in the short story to eight pages in the novel. Abbot Arkos was shown to possess doubts and uncertainty, unlike the dogmatism of Father Juan.
Miller also used the adaptation process to add a layer of complexity to the story. Walker Percy recognized this dimension of the novel, which he compared to a "cipher, a coded message, a book in a strange language". David Seed deemed the novel "charged with half-concealed meaning", an intricacy that seems to have been added as Miller was revising the stories for publication as a novel. Decoding messages such as this is an important activity in Miller's works, both in A Canticle for Leibowitz and in his short stories. For example, in the original version of "Fiat Homo", Miller limits his "wordplay" to an explicit symbolism involving the letter "V" and Brother Francis' "Voice/Vocation" during Francis' encounter with the wandering pilgrim. In the novel, however, "Miller reserves such symbolistic cross-references to the more intellectual analysts and builds a comedy of incomprehension around Francis".
Miller's experience in writing for science fiction magazines contributed to his writing of A Canticle for Leibowitz. His background was with the medium lengths of the short story, novelette, and short novel, where he combined character, action, and import. This full-length novel has a tripartite structure: each section is "short novel size, with counterpoint, motifs, and allusions making up for the lack of more ordinary means of continuity".
Publication A Canticle for Leibowitz was published by J. B. Lippincott & Co. as a hardcover in October 1959, and two reprints appeared within the first year. More than 40 new editions and reprints have appeared for the book, which has never been out of print. It often appears on "best of" lists, and has been recognized three times with Locus Poll Awards for best all-time science fiction novel.
Plot summary Background After 20th-century civilization was destroyed by a global nuclear war, known as the "Flame Deluge", there was a violent backlash against the culture of advanced knowledge and technology that had led to the development of nuclear weapons. During this backlash, called the "Simplification", anyone accused of learning, and eventually anyone who could even read, was likely to be killed by rampaging mobs, who proudly took on the name of "Simpletons". Illiteracy became almost universal, and books were destroyed en masse.
Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish electrical engineer working for the United States military, survived the war and sought refuge from the mobs of the "Simplification" in the sanctuary of a Cistercian monastery, all the while surreptitiously searching for his wife, from whom he had become separated in the war. Eventually concluding that his wife was dead, he joined the monastery, took holy orders (becoming a priest), and dedicated his life to preserving knowledge by hiding books, smuggling them to safety (known as "booklegging"), memorizing, and copying them. He approached the Church for permission to found a new monastic order dedicated to this purpose. With permission granted, he founded his new order in the desert of the American Southwest, where it became known as the "Albertian Order of Leibowitz". The Order's abbey is located in a remote desert in New Mexico, possibly near the military base where Leibowitz worked before the war, on an old road that may have been "a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso". Leibowitz was eventually betrayed and martyred. Later beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, he became a candidate for sainthood.
Six hundred years after his death, the abbey still preserves the "Memorabilia", the collected writings and artifacts of 20th-century civilization that survived the Flame Deluge and the Simplification, in the hope that they will help future generations reclaim forgotten science.
The story is structured in three parts: "", "", and "". The parts are separated by periods of six centuries each.
("Let There Be Man") In the 26th century, a 17-year-old novice named Brother Francis Gerard of Utah is on a vigil in a New Mexico desert. While searching for a rock to complete a shelter from the desert wolves, Brother Francis encounters a vagrant Wanderer, apparently looking for the abbey, who inscribes Hebrew on a rock that appears to be the perfect fit for the shelter. When Brother Francis picks up the rock, he discovers the entrance to an ancient fallout shelter containing "relics", such as handwritten notes on crumbling memo pads bearing cryptic texts resembling a 20th-century shopping list. He soon realizes that these notes appear to have been written by Leibowitz, his order's founder. The discovery of the ancient documents causes an uproar at the monastery, as the other monks speculate that the relics once belonged to Leibowitz. Brother Francis's account of the Wanderer, who ultimately never turned up at the abbey, is also greatly embellished by the other monks amid rumours that he was an apparition of Leibowitz himself; Francis strenuously denies the embellishments, but equally persistently refuses to deny that the encounter occurred, despite the lack of other witnesses. Abbot Arkos, the head of the monastery, worries that the discovery of so many potentially holy relics in such a short period may cause delays in Leibowitz's canonization process. Francis is banished back to the desert to complete his vigil and defuse the sensationalism.
Many years later, the abbey is visited by Monsignors Aguerra (God's Advocate) and Flaught (the Devil's Advocate), the Church's investigators in the case for Leibowitz's sainthood. Leibowitz is eventually canonized as Saint Leibowitz – based partly on the evidence Francis discovered in the shelter – and Brother Francis is sent to New Rome to represent the Order at the canonization Mass. He brings with him the documents found in the shelter, and an illumination of one of the documents on which he has spent fifteen years working, as a gift to the Pope.