A Canticle for LeibowitzMy rating: 2 of 5 stars

I think I might have liked this story more when I was a kid. It’s classic-era science fiction, meaning to me it has a great premise but weak plot, poor character development and simplistic morality. It’s the type of book I devoured as a kid. I loved adventure and didn’t think about the motives or actions behind those who were positioned as good and bad, I just accepted it.

Miller has the opportunity to explore how, and why, people and organizations make the decisions they do. He assumed one group would do it right, his Catholic church, and the other groups (governments) would do it wrong. His only case seemed to be that governments are run by people, who are always fallible. But, his church is made up of and run by people. He also misses an opportunity to explore the relationships within the abbey, between it and Rome and between the various factions in Rome. He could have kept the church his greatest good, but complicated the situation. That hurt the book for me. There’s also the offensive use of the antisemitic myth of the Wandering Jew used throughout the novel.

Typical for the era and genre, one dominated by male writers, there were very few female characters. I counted four: “Lady Reporter”, Sister Helene, Mrs. Grales and an unnamed woman with radiation sickness. They are all one-dimensional and the only two are given more than one scene. Mrs. Grales is the only one who starts to be seen in a bigger light, but only when her main personality is killed and a childlike figure becomes animate.

While not quite the same premise, I much prefer Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy for how to preserve and foster knowledge through a long-duration crisis.