To: epicure who wrote (62897 ) 10/18/2002 9:00:05 AM From: Solon Read Replies (1) | Respond to But he captures the irony of the prevalent need to believe and to find transcendent meaning...A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) - first published as three novellas in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1955, 1956, 1957) and then in book form after some rework. In the first part, 'Fiat Homo', set in the dark ages 600 years after a nuclear war, the savage world is terrorized by beasts, mutants and robbers. Knowledge is mixed with myths and Catholic monasteries preserve indecipherable remnants of former civilization. At the Abbey of St. Leibowitz monks have copied generations after generations the Memorabilia of Leibowitz, without understanding their meaning. Leibowitz is considered a saint but ironically the reader sees that he was a Jewish physicist and his cherished texts are grocery lists, a lottery ticket and drawings of electrical control systems. And there are hints that Leibowitz was involved in a Top Secret government project. Brother Francis, a young monk, finds a technical drawing, which is included in Leibowitz's relics and dies violently fifteen years later for a blueprint initialled by the Blessed Leibowitz. The second part, 'Fiat Lux', takes the reader to another period which has much similarities with the Renaissance. Science is breaking free from the chains of religion, electricity is reinvented. The dawn of a new era is embodied in the self-assured scientist Thon Taddeo. Dom Paolo, an old and gentle Abbot, doubts the blessings of the new technological inventions and tries to keep his faith in. In the last part, 'Fiat Voluntas Tua', the world is again drifting into a global crisis a nuclear war. The Order of Leibowitz has lost its power but prepares a spaceship to escape the second holocaust. A group of clergy and children leave the Earth to start their life again in Alpha Centauri. In A Canticle for Leibowitz Miller posed the basic question of post-apocalypse fiction: "Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no chance but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?" In the mythology Phoenix is a symbol of destruction and re-creation. But in the Christian world, Phoenix also suggests the triumph of eternal life over death. Along with James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strage Land (1961), and Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (1969) it belonged to the few SF novels of the 1950s and 1960s, which tackled religious questions in freash way.kirjasto.sci.fi
