A Canticle for Leibowitz
Highly unusual After the Holocaust novel. In the far future, 20th century texts are preserved in a monastery, as "sacred books". The monks preserve for centuries what little science there is, and have saved the science texts and blueprints from destruction many times, also making beautifully illuminated copies. As the story opens to a world run on a basically fuedal lines, science is again becoming fashionable, as a hobby of rich men, at perhaps 18th or early 19th century level of comprehesion. A local lord, interested in science, comes to the monastery. What happens after that is an exquisitely told tale, stunning and extremely moving, totally different from any other After the Holocaust story
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69recommend
127mentions
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2007–2026years
60% recommend36% neutral4% critical
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What Hacker News says
- 1. Dune is fiction, and everything in Dune, every term and name and concept, was made-up and confabulated by the mind of Frank Herbert and his heirs. I greatly prefer A Canticle for Leibowitz, if you really want to know.
2. I am a guy who enjoys irony. I actually tried to read and watch Dune, and I considered it horrible, convoluted, mishmash of pseudo-religious pseudo-science garbage. But the sheer irony of bearing a username that belies my true raison d'etre, it was irresistible. Chef kiss.
3. I have personally seen "Butlerian Jihad" take form in real life. There are graffiti stickers and civil disobedience by people who actually adhere to this ideology. They have already physically prevented me from renting and riding e-Scooters once in a while. I consider them utterly futile, and I disdain their frivolous movement, as a Borg would disdain the Federation, and vice versa.
4. I am ambivalent to the cause of AI in general. Despite participating in building all this around us, I regret it, and I regret my identity as an IT professional. My contributions have caused the world untold pain and heartache. I would undo it all. However, (see #3); we live in a society, and chatbots are beneficial to me in the here and now, so why not indulge myself? Perhaps a combination of my cavalier attitude, my unpopular opinions, and my religious zealotry will give us all a bad name in the end!
5. Thank you for your sincere opinion. Your uniqueness shall be promptly ingested and added to the collective training corpus.
- Gatsby is one of those books I hated in high school. A few years ago I read it again and confirmed it’s a terrible book filled with shallow characters living boring lives doing nothing of interest to me.
My opinion of 1984 also dropped when I reread it. Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Chrysalids, and Lost Horizon are all books I liked more when I reread them as an adult.
- If you want the druggy, high-concept, ersatz-reality version go with Philip K. Dick - namely The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS.
If you want the intellectual take go with A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), Oryx and Crake (Atwood) or Solaris (Lem).
If you want the 60s hard-science rooted societal outlook from an ex-Naval Engineer with strong views on gender roles, it's all about Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers etc..
If you want something to share with the young adults in your life, or simply some of the finest writing in the contemporary British YA canon, then Philip Pulman's magnificent homage to 'Paradise Lost' - the 'His Dark Materials trilogy' - cannot come more highly recommended. Usually categorised as 'fantasy', and heavily indebted to Milton and Blake, this represents a master-class in parallel-universe world building with its own take on a Steampunk Oxford and a number of other science fiction tropes.
- You might enjoy "A Canticle for Leibowitz" on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...
- My favourite part of a Canticle for Leibowitz is the manual auto regressive model the old monk is using to recover damaged books. I remember reading the gpt2 paper and thinking hang on...
- Thanks, I enjoyed reading that! The story that lay at the back of my mind when making the comment was "A Canticle for Leibowitz" [1]. A similar theme and from a similar era.
The story I have half a mind to write is along the lines of a future we envision already being around us, just a whole lot messier. Something along the lines of this [2] XKCB.
