A Canticle for Leibowitz

Phew, yuck - the double-headed irradiated tomato woman. I mean, damn.

Pretty good. A fun, freaky far future sci-fi about how “history doesn't repeat itself - but it rhymes”.

This book skips along the centuries, but we start in a post-nuclear apocalypse wasteland somewhere in the southwestern US, sometime 100-200 years from now. A Christian monastic order has grown up around a supposed “Saint Liebowitz” (who sounds like he was a young engineer minion on some Manhattan Project equivalent). In a clear parallel to the Medieval period, the monks spend most of their time lamenting the “demon Fallout” and the great hellfire that destroyed the world, and illuminating manuscripts that are recovered from that wasteland - preserving knowledge while not understanding it. There is a funny bit where it seems that one monk labors 14 years illuminating the copy of a page of Liebowitz's doodles from a meeting.

Anyway, generations pass, and we have an interesting dawn of the Enlightenment/Renaissance period, with an arrogant Isaac Newton duplicate, and the (inevitable?) scientific progress towards the inevitable second nuclear age.

OK, some thoughts:

The Christian stuff
Just like the Hyperion series (which also features far future speculation where Christian monastic orders miraculously survive and much Latin spokeneth est), I had trouble willingly suspending my disbelief for this. Maybe I discredit Christianity's persistence. But I was like, RLY? So much Latin. SO MUCH. And while the Hyperion series's weird far future Christianity is sort of gloriously Gothic and pulpy, this stuff felt like much more like Walter Miller's specific affection for bumbling Medieval monks.

The book actually ends on some interesting, horrible tensions surrounding Christianity's dedication to being super pro-life, even at the cost of seemingly pragmatic mercy. I couldn't parse out where the author fell on this stuff; it felt authentic - neither glorifying the monks' unwavering commitment to their principles, nor condemning how horrible that commitment can be. So that was interesting.

The Fermi paradox stuff
The Fermi paradox asks why, amidst all these billions of stars, we've never seen any evidence of alien life. One answer is that technological development is necessarily self-destroying - i.e. the capability of total self-destruction always comes before the capability of robust space colonization. This book has a sort of interesting answer/twist on that, which I liked.

The moments of magic(al) realism/fantasy
For a book that's more sci-fi than fantasy, there was a thread of Something Magical - or something weird, anyway - which I wasn't too big of a fan of. But I shall speak no more, lest I spoilerize.