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review 2014-06-23 14:48
Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s only novel. He was an Air Force engineer who was involved in the WWII bombing of an Italian monastery. Later, he converted to Catholicism, wrote this book, and eventually committed suicide.

Given the context of Miller's life, it's difficult to believe he could have written any other story. Canticle is a millennium-spanning, quietly epic novel that addresses mankind's constant cycle of self-destruction, barbarism, renaissance, and more self-destruction. It takes place in a Catholic monastery in what was once Utah, several centuries after the world was demolished by nuclear war. There, the monks worship one Saint Leibowitz, a somewhat mythical figure from "the time of the Flame Deluge" who attempted to salvage humanity's collected knowledge during the postwar book-burning backlash. The novel is divided into three sections separated by centuries and so different from each other that they're almost separate books in their own right.

The first, "Fiat Homo", takes place in the dark age that still exists several centuries after the war; the continent is populated with warring nomad tribes and feudal city-states, and the monks busy themselves copying and preserving their library for future generations, firmly believing that someday mankind will once again desire and benefit from the old knowledge.

In "Fiat Lux", that belief comes to fruition; the world is abuzz with a new renaissance of culture and science. A prominent scholar visits the abbey and is astonished at the wealth of scientific knowledge housed there. But outside the monastery, a war is waged between burgeoning empires, with the church caught in the middle.

Finally, in "Fiat Voluntas Tua", mankind has reached technological maturity, once again able to create rockets, robots, and nuclear bombs (the book was written in 1959, and these three artifacts seem to be the hallmarks of The Future in spec-fic of that era). America is once again an empire; so is Asia, and miscommunication and overreaction between the two don't bode well for the future of humanity.

Overall, the book is meditative, dark, and epic, but also at times very funny. There are major themes of faith vs. politics (and similarly, church vs. state), humanity's persistent short-sightedness, and the meaning of suffering. In these elements, the story is saturated with Miller's Catholic viewpoint. But there are also some very bleak, unCatholic threads to the story. Essentially, it's about a group of monks who work for a millennium to salvage, restore, protect, and share the collected knowledge of mankind, only to have the world use that knowledge to yet again destroy itself. The monastery itself acts as Eden's tree of knowledge. Not to mention the irony of this particular group of monks worshipping a Jewish man who likely converted only because he saw the monastery's potential as a bastion of learning in the midst of a world bent on ignorance.

This book isn't for everyone; it's slow-moving, somewhat dated, heavily religious, and contains a great deal of untranslated Latin. But it is deservedly one of the classics of Cold War-era apocalyptic fiction: dark, pessimistic, thought-provoking, and sadly believable.

 

February 3, 2008

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review 2014-03-12 05:14
Review: Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis

Utopias are rarely played straight these days.  Though I could name off the top of my head a dozen recent, hugely popular dystopian novels (especially in YA - man, teens sure love their crapsack worlds), I can't think of any modern big-name utopias.  (Not true utopias, anyway.  If it's hiding a dark underbelly, it doesn't count...)

 

In a way the discrepancy seems odd, since the "topias" are very much two sides of the same coin (speculative futures with some sort of ideological axe to grind; extrapolations of contemporary trends that are fundamentally of their time).  But dystopias are dark and broken and savage.  They terrify and fascinate us.  Utopias are homogenous and void of conflict and insufferably didactic.  They bore and patronize us.

 

That's my take, anyway.  I can only think of two flavors of genuine utopias I've read in the past few years - second-wave feminist utopias like Woman on the Edge of Time and A Door Into Ocean, and religious (particularly Christian) utopias like Out of the Silent Planet.  It's surprising how much they have in common, despite the major ideological differences between modern feminism and mainstream Christianity.

 

The societies in the three books I mentioned all share many of the same traits: interracial and interspecies egalitarianism; no crime and no need for laws; environmental custodianship; responsible procreation rates; and so on.  And the reason given for our world being so comparatively corrupt and broken?  Because it is ruled by either dudes or the devil (pick your ideology).

 

So utopias tend to look the same, though they rest on very different (sometimes fundamentally contradictory) principles.  And I have very little interest in delving into yet another cookie-cutter perfect society while characters preach to me about why our world could be beautifully harmonious, too, if we all just adopted X philosophy. 

 

No thanks, I'll take the crapsack worlds.

 

 

Still, I am unaccountably charmed by Out of the Silent Planet.  Aside from the ideological stuff, there's something so pure and classic about this story - that wonder of cosmic discovery (exploring strange new worlds; seeking out new life and new civilizations; boldly going and so forth) - that still feels fresh, that still makes me fall in love with science fiction.

 

I've read Lewis's Space Trilogy before, but it's been at least 15 years.  I'd forgotten how much fun they are.  Ransom, the protagonist, is a somewhat timid, introverted academic who is kidnapped by a couple of capitalist douchebags and taken to Mars - where they plan to use him as a human sacrifice to the Martians in return for access to gold.  Instead, Ransom escapes the greedy buffoons, dodges a seriously badass sea monster, and befriends the otter-like Martians, learning their language and their utopian customs, and eventually going to hang out with Oyarsa, the Martian Jesus (who, oddly, reads more like the Martian Aslan than anything out of the Bible - Lewis has a very specific character-type in mind for his Christ figures).  Sermons are declaimed, weird religious allegories are constructed, the kidnappers get their comeuppance, and everything is tied up neatly in 150 pages.

 

 

Based on the story alone, Out of the Silent Planet is totally enjoyable, but like all of Lewis's fiction the book gets bogged down in its religious objectives.  There's a lot of religious SFF that I really love, from The Lord of the Rings to much of Wolfe's work to books like The Sparrow and Lord of Light.  But Lewis just can't seem to weave in religious themes without getting annoyingly preachy and simplistically allegorical.  I think he manages it best in Till We Have Faces (though I have issues with that one as well), but his genre novels are ridiculously transparent in their sermonizing - which was, of course, fully intended.  He wanted to inculcate the masses with Christian doctrine by distracting them with fun stories.

 

And the stories are fun.  The sermons, less so.

 

(2014 #10)

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review 1970-01-01 00:00
Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom - Ernst Bloch, J. T. Swann (Translator), Peter Thompson (Introduction) Wrong title, stupid contents. Not worth my time.
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