I’m still trying to catch up with all the books I’ve read over the last few weeks. So here’s a quick note about a book I finished last week, A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller.
Normally, I don’t read nuclear holocaust books, but this one had a really interesting take on the idea. Normally, I read plague books. I don’t know why I find that more interesting than the Dr. Strangelove end of the world, but I do. (An unrelated funny about Dr. Strangelove.)
Basically, multiple nuclear detonations wipe out most of life on Earth and humanity starts rebuilding itself. The new civilization is basically a rerun of our own medieval period–with monks preserving history, barbarian hordes, warlords carving out empires, and so on. There’s even a Renaissance-like period.
I especially liked watching how Catholicism survived. There was a lot of Latin, which threw me for a bit, until I remembered that, at the time this book was written, Vatican II hadn’t happened yet, and priests weren’t using the vernacular in services yet.
I don’t want to ruin the ending by saying what happened, but I really enjoyed the irony of what happened.