Kim Miller
In the early pages of this book I thought I was in some Kafka world. By the time I got to later parts I didn't know what to make of it. And as it ended I was getting a bit of a feel for what is really going on. I guess being weird for the sake of being weird sometimes turns out OK.
Ultimately this is a book of warfare, but we never really find out who the enemy is. What we do find out is that the enemy has the power to erase any memories the people have of their engagement with them, or it, or anything to do with the war. In this respect the enemy is an anti-meme. A meme is a thing that we remember but has a life of its own. And antimeme exists if we observe it but no sooner do we turn our back and it is gone from memory and therefore gone from existence.
The Foundation is the only surviving agency fighting the war, and its members are disappearing. The stronger antimemes have the power to overrun a person's mind to the point of death. Foundation agents take certain drugs that allow them to remember antimeme contact and therefore plot against them. We learn that there has been at least one antimeme war that obliterated the human population some time in the distant past.
Marion Wheeler is the main agent and head of The Foundation. Her husband, Adam, is not an agent but he seems to be immune from the 'forget impact' and the antimemes. Marion is the main player in the book, but Adam emerges as humanity's real hope towards the end.
In the early pages of this book I thought I was in some Kafka world. By the time I got to later parts I didn't know what to make of it. And as it ended I was getting a bit of a feel for what is really going on. I guess being weird for the sake of being weird sometimes turns out OK.
Ultimately this is a book of warfare, but we never really find out who the enemy is. What we do find out is that the enemy has the power to erase any memories the people have of their engagement with them, or it, or anything to do with the war. In this respect the enemy is an anti-meme. A meme is a thing that we remember but has a life of its own. And antimeme exists if we observe it but no sooner do we turn our back and it is gone from memory and therefore gone from existence.
The Foundation is the only surviving agency fighting the war, and its members are disappearing. The stronger antimemes have the power to overrun a person's mind to the point of death. Foundation agents take certain drugs that allow them to remember antimeme contact and therefore plot against them. We learn that there has been at least one antimeme war that obliterated the human population some time in the distant past.
Marion Wheeler is the main agent and head of The Foundation. Her husband, Adam, is not an agent but he seems to be immune from the 'forget impact' and the antimemes. Marion is the main player in the book, but Adam emerges as humanity's real hope towards the end.
The world has gone through a nuclear war and lies in ruins. 600 years later some communities of people are forming, and one of them is a monastic order dedicated to Saint Leibowitz. He was martyred for his faith in the aftermath of the war and we are introduced to a novice of the order, Brother Francis. Francis stumbles into a buried fallout shelter and finds more of the writings of Leibowitz, but revealing them to his Abbot causes a crisis. Are they authentic? What do they mean? And what do they reveal about Leibowitz?
As the novel progresses we find that the history in the minds of the monks is not as they believe. They live in naivete about the past and its consequences. Their shared holiness, however, maintains them in faith and conviction.
The undercurrents of the novel reveal that Leibowitz was an engineer and his 'writings' are engineering and electronic diagrams. He was killed in a time called The Simplification where all educated people were seen as the cause of the war and were murdered by the survivors as they burned any surviving books and libraries. The monks were secretly finding and storing books and teaching themselves to read.
Part 1 of the book is the story of Francis. He is the sweetest and most wholesome person imaginable and he maintains his faith in his precious saint and lives in obedience to his Abbot through the political wranglings of his superiors caused by what Francis has found. The gentle humour that underlies much of the book is shown when Francis finds the fallout shelter. He knows that 'fallout' killed most of the world's inhabitants but he doesn't know what it is. He sees the sign 'Fallout Shelter' on the door and thinks 'That must be where a fallout is hiding. No way am I opening that door. It might still be alive and attack me.'
Part 2 of the book takes us another 600 years into the future. The monastery has expanded in numbers and the buildings have been fortified. Other communities have risen, one of them is the 'city' where ignorant and uneducated people have control over the political life, the other is a band of savages living in the forest. They waylay travelers and are known for cannibalism. The monks continue to struggle with interpreting the works of Leibowitz, but secular intellectuals from the city are now interested as they think there might be leads towards learning the technology of the past. The Abbott of this era is occupied in preserving the monastery and their saint in the face of the warfare that is looming after the city reinvents gun powder and muskets and can now move against the savages.
Part 3 takes us a further 600 years. Space travel has been achieved, technology is everywhere and the Abbott has a self driving car and his order has a starship ready to take missionaries to the colony worlds of Alpha Centauri. But technology also means the increase of nuclear weapons and an old threat reemerges. Much of this part of the book is taken up with discussions of morality and responsibility as the Abbot and his order struggle to maintain the beliefs that have informed their community life for centuries against the pragmatism of the city and a looming nuclear faceoff.
It was only after reading the book that I found that the author had been a rear gunner of a bomber in WW2 and on one mission they'd bombed a monastery in Italy. It had a profound effect on him and he converted to Catholicism after the war and struggled with PTSD and depression. 1959, the publication date, was also a time of great fear in America (I'm not American) and children used to do attack drills and were taught to hide under their desks etc. For me, sixty five years later and on the other side of the world, the story still hits hard for its literary value and without the undercurrent of fear that fueled American life when it was written.
The world has gone through a nuclear war and lies in ruins. 600 years later some communities of people are forming, and one of them is a monastic order dedicated to Saint Leibowitz. He was martyred for his faith in the aftermath of the war and we are introduced to a novice of the order, Brother Francis. Francis stumbles into a buried fallout shelter and finds more of the writings of Leibowitz, but revealing them to his Abbot causes a crisis. Are they authentic? What do they mean? And what do they reveal about Leibowitz?
As the novel progresses we find that the history in the minds of the monks is not as they believe. They live in naivete about the past and its consequences. Their shared holiness, however, maintains them in faith and conviction.
The undercurrents of the novel reveal that Leibowitz was an engineer and his 'writings' are engineering and electronic diagrams. He was killed in a time called The Simplification where all educated people were seen as the cause of the war and were murdered by the survivors as they burned any surviving books and libraries. The monks were secretly finding and storing books and teaching themselves to read.
Part 1 of the book is the story of Francis. He is the sweetest and most wholesome person imaginable and he maintains his faith in his precious saint and lives in obedience to his Abbot through the political wranglings of his superiors caused by what Francis has found. The gentle humour that underlies much of the book is shown when Francis finds the fallout shelter. He knows that 'fallout' killed most of the world's inhabitants but he doesn't know what it is. He sees the sign 'Fallout Shelter' on the door and thinks 'That must be where a fallout is hiding. No way am I opening that door. It might still be alive and attack me.'
Part 2 of the book takes us another 600 years into the future. The monastery has expanded in numbers and the buildings have been fortified. Other communities have risen, one of them is the 'city' where ignorant and uneducated people have control over the political life, the other is a band of savages living in the forest. They waylay travelers and are known for cannibalism. The monks continue to struggle with interpreting the works of Leibowitz, but secular intellectuals from the city are now interested as they think there might be leads towards learning the technology of the past. The Abbott of this era is occupied in preserving the monastery and their saint in the face of the warfare that is looming after the city reinvents gun powder and muskets and can now move against the savages.
Part 3 takes us a further 600 years. Space travel has been achieved, technology is everywhere and the Abbott has a self driving car and his order has a starship ready to take missionaries to the colony worlds of Alpha Centauri. But technology also means the increase of nuclear weapons and an old threat reemerges. Much of this part of the book is taken up with discussions of morality and responsibility as the Abbot and his order struggle to maintain the beliefs that have informed their community life for centuries against the pragmatism of the city and a looming nuclear faceoff.
It was only after reading the book that I found that the author had been a rear gunner of a bomber in WW2 and on one mission they'd bombed a monastery in Italy. It had a profound effect on him and he converted to Catholicism after the war and struggled with PTSD and depression. 1959, the publication date, was also a time of great fear in America (I'm not American) and children used to do attack drills and were taught to hide under their desks etc. For me, sixty five years later and on the other side of the world, the story still hits hard for its literary value and without the undercurrent of fear that fueled American life when it was written.
Abelard Lindsay is a shaper and his cousin Constantine is a mechanist. The shapers see the future of humanity in genetic enhancement. The mechanists see it as physical futurism with enhanced body parts. They can't both be right. And they choose not to be. This book is the story of Lindsay, a shaper diplomat, as he travels the interplanetary spread of humanity to promote the shaper ideology. And on his heels is Constantine. Each of they appear and disappear as they take different identities, trying to influence other civilisations and to defeat each other. On his travels Lindsay takes on not only different names but different body structure and abilities. At the end it seems as if the future of humanity is to return to the sea as sub-oceanic beings on the moons of Jupiter. Or something. It gets confusing at the end.
The characters start out being engaging as the conflict between them is slowly revealed. However, by the half way point it's become something of a travelogue with different planets or asteroids requiring different body forms for Lindsay. He gets into danger on one asteroid and escapes to another, rinse and repeat.
At about the 75% point the narrative descends into long conversations where the sociopolitical advantages and disadvantages of various views of post-humanism are discussed. It's like sitting in a bar with the people at the next table talking about the obscurities of their work and all the while the reader wishes he'd accepted the invitation to play darts instead.
Overall the book is reminiscent of Accelerando where the increasingly complicated language of hard SF is played out like a game of UNO.
Abelard Lindsay is a shaper and his cousin Constantine is a mechanist. The shapers see the future of humanity in genetic enhancement. The mechanists see it as physical futurism with enhanced body parts. They can't both be right. And they choose not to be. This book is the story of Lindsay, a shaper diplomat, as he travels the interplanetary spread of humanity to promote the shaper ideology. And on his heels is Constantine. Each of they appear and disappear as they take different identities, trying to influence other civilisations and to defeat each other. On his travels Lindsay takes on not only different names but different body structure and abilities. At the end it seems as if the future of humanity is to return to the sea as sub-oceanic beings on the moons of Jupiter. Or something. It gets confusing at the end.
The characters start out being engaging as the conflict between them is slowly revealed. However, by the half way point it's become something of a travelogue with different planets or asteroids requiring different body forms for Lindsay. He gets into danger on one asteroid and escapes to another, rinse and repeat.
At about the 75% point the narrative descends into long conversations where the sociopolitical advantages and disadvantages of various views of post-humanism are discussed. It's like sitting in a bar with the people at the next table talking about the obscurities of their work and all the while the reader wishes he'd accepted the invitation to play darts instead.
Overall the book is reminiscent of Accelerando where the increasingly complicated language of hard SF is played out like a game of UNO.