A Canticle for Leibowitz

I haven't read every science fiction novel ever published, so I can't say that A Canticle for Leibowitz --by Walter M. Miller, Jr., first published in 1960 - is unique.

But it's pretty darn unique. The setting, for one thing: in a monastery. And the protagonists? Monks. Not your standard sci-fi for sure.

I can remember getting a few pages into it and thinking - this is funny. The idea that you could write a serious novel and make it witty and fun was a revelation. (These were my early teen years; I hadn't yet read Pride and Prejudice.) Perhaps this explains, in part, my life-long prejudice against works with I AM A PIECE OF SERIOUS LITERATURE written all over them.

A prejudice, by the way, which extends to movies. Ingmar Bergman? ZZZZZZZ.

The main character of the first part (Fiat Homo, "Let there be man") is Brother Francis, a young novice at an abbey in the post-apocalyptic southwestern United States. Brother Francis - charming, naive, trusting - is another revelation. He wants to be monk (memo from the teenaged me: say what?).

Occasionally you will find a reviewer who rants about Miller's supposed pro-Roman Catholic bias; that Canticle promotes 'blind faith' and an unquestioning subservience to authority. These reviewers have apparently not read beyond the first few pages. Brother Francis - despite his devotion to the abbey, despite his trust in his superiors and his desperate longing to be allowed to profess his vows - refuses (in the face of considerable pressure from the abbot) to recant his story that he saw someone who might have been 'the blessed Leibowitz' out in the desert.

He refuses, in other words, to bend to authority, to change what he believes to be the truth even the tiniest bit. The reader admires him, even as we are also invited to understand the reasoning of the very human and politically astute abbot.

Fiat Homo ends with Brother Francis' death from an arrow to the head. He is buried by the same old man who might have been - but in the end, was not - the blessed Leibowitz.