A Canticle for Leibowitz

The American writer Walter M. Miller Jr. published his post-apocalyptic science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz in 1959. The setting is a Catholic monastery in the south-western United States, in desert country left behind by a nuclear war, and the story stretches across thousands of years as civilisation rebuilds itself. The book was assembled from three stories that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, it has never gone out of print, and it counts as one of the standard works of post-apocalyptic fiction.

After the war, the survivors turn on the people who built the weapons, and most of the knowledge is destroyed. In the desert, an abbey keeps a relic it does not fully understand: the memorabilia of a twentieth-century engineer called Leibowitz, which the monks copy the way they copy scripture. The task of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz is to keep the surviving scraps of scientific knowledge safe until the world can use them again.

The narrative spans three long movements, each with a different narrator and a different century: a dark age, a new age of learning in which science becomes fashionable again, and a second fall. The abbey's archives outlast every empire that rises around it, and the same arguments about knowledge and its uses recur across the centuries.

Miller wrote the stories after taking part in the bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino during the Second World War, which gave the book its central image. It is a standalone novel, and the three parts were written as separate stories before being assembled into one book.