Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller, Jr.
1960
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This book is a great example of one of my favorite sci-fi sub-genres: post-nuclear-war Earth.

The book’s back story is that sometime towards the end of the twentieth century, a global nuclear war nearly destroyed all life on Earth. Afterward, bands of survivors turned in fury against anyone who they felt was responsible. At first this included mainly scientists and engineers and physicists but eventually came to include anyone who was merely literate.

The few learned people who escaped being killed by angry mobs fled to the one institution that would protect them – the Catholic Church. There, a former electrician named Leibowitz organized them into “memorizers,” who memorized as many of the old texts as possible (as in Fahrenheit 451), and “bookleggers,” who scavenged for any books that may have survived and brought them to the abbeys to be hidden.

The story is told in three parts, each separated by hundreds of years from the next. All three parts center on the brothers of the Order of Leibowitz, who live in a remote abbey in the post-war desert that used to be the southwestern United States.

The first part of Canticle opens several hundred years into this dark age. There is no electricity and no industry; the country is divided into loose territories ruled by warlords; people dress in homespun and grow all their own food; travelers are terrorized by bandits.

Our introduction to the world of Canticle is through the eyes of Brother Francis, an earnest but somewhat addled young novice in the Leibowitzian Order. To Francis, the long-past nuclear war was “the Flame Deluge” and the period where the survivors murdered anyone literate was “the Age of Simplification.” The remnants of the war around him – the crumbled buildings, the mutant people – are all part of a divine plan.

So much time has passed since the war ended that the technical “Memorabilia” that Brother Francis and the other priests have painstakingly saved, stored, and recopied is inscrutable even to them. They have a vague sense of their own history and purpose only through religious stories and parables that they have memorized by rote. The most basic technological accomplishments of “the ancients” (us) in the “twilight of the age of enlightenment” (the end of the twentieth century) seem like magic.

Eventually, however, we see particularly curious scholars studying the abbey’s library and gradually starting to piece together the technology of the old world.

One of the best aspects of this book is the writing itself. I usually like what I’m reading to be straightforward and plain. But the religious imagery and the thoughts and conversations that Miller's characters have are beautifully, archaically written and, at the same time, funny, ironic, and interwoven with modern content. There are entire sections of the narrative that read like poetry. It’s like Lord of Light, but Christian.

In the beginning of the book, for example, Brother Francis is out in the desert suffering through a thirty-day Lenten vigil when he stumbles across a tremendous find: a long-buried fallout shelter containing relics that may well be connected to the Beatus Leibowitz himself. When Francis reads the ancient sign that says it is a Fallout Shelter, however, he is horrified and won’t open the door. After all, the Fallout Shelter may very well contain a Fallout – “a terrifying beast, a fiend of Hell” – and if he opens it, the Fallout could escape and eat him. To steel his courage, Francis says some of the vesicles from the litany of the Saints:

From the place of ground zero,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the rain of the cobalt,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the rain of the strontium,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the fall of the cesium,
O Lord, deliver us.

From the curse of the Fallout,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the begetting of monsters,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the curse of the Misborn,
O Lord, deliver us.
A morte perpetua,
Domine, libera nos.

What makes this book great, though, is that not only is it well-written and funny, but it is also depressing and sad.

Throughout the entire book runs a feeling of dread: that humanity may be doomed to an endless cycle of self-destruction. We grow, we learn, we invent, we come to think that we can create Utopia. And then, when we realize that we cannot, we become hopeless and frustrated and angry and crush what we have made.

On the one hand, you feel sorry for the war survivors, fumbling blindly through the world with no electricity or labor-saving devices. You want them to benefit from knowledge, to emerge from the dark. But at the same time you dread the inevitable destruction that knowledge appears to lead to. You know that if they do not recover the science, there will be no danger of another nuclear war. As Miller says in Canticle:

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America – burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again.

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

All of this takes on much more weight when you find out that Miller shot himself in 1996 at the age of 74. At the end of my 2006 paperback edition of Canticle, there is an end note that informs you not only of his suicide, but also that he was a tail-gunner in a bomber in World War II, “participating in more than fifty-five combat sorties, among them the controversial destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Casino, the oldest monastery in the Western world.”


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Thoughts on the Confusing Nature of Star Wars Fandom

You Take Your Star Wars, I'll Keep Mine is yet another great post by Emily Asher-Perrin on Tor.com.

Book Review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon
2007
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
The reason this book is considered science fiction – and one of the reasons it probably got so much attention – is because it is set in a provocative alternate history. Aside from that, it is really a murder mystery, and not a very riveting one. And it has one major problem, which I will get into in a minute.
 
The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a homicide detective. He lives in the Alaskan panhandle, in the district of Sitka, which was granted to Jewish refugees on a 60-year lease following the collapse of the state of Israel shortly after World War II. Ever since they began moving in, there has been a tension between the Jewish settlers and the already-resident Alaskans, both native and white.
 
When the book opens, it is 2007 and the 60-year settlement lease is due to expire in two months. This means that every Jewish person living in the region will need to either get Alaskan permission to stay or will have to move elsewhere. This weighs over everyone throughout the story, especially Detective Landsman, who has done zero preparation for it.
 
The mystery begins when a man is found murdered in the same fleabag hotel where Landsman is living. Landsman and his partner spend the book solving the case, along the way coping with sinister and corrupt religious fanatics, asocial chess club members, and a police hierarchy that wants to sweep all outstanding homicides under the rug so they can hand over a clean slate to the incoming Alaskan regime.
 
Sounds good, right?
 
The major problem, the downfall from which there is no escape, is the writing. Chabon gets a lot of kudos from reviewers for his “smart,” “inventive,” “funny,” and “sharp” style. But I have to say I found it obnoxious.
 
I have broken my stylistic complaints into three categories.

Complaint One: Tense
 
This book is told in the present tense. I always find that hard to get used to. Why do authors do that? Is it supposed to create a special mood or sense of heightened drama?
 
It doesn’t help that this book is full of flashbacks which are told in the past tense. I found it jarring to be coasting along in a nice past-tense flashback and then slamming back into the disconcertingly present-tense main story line.
 
Complaint Two: Terms
 
Chabon uses a lot of slang terms for Jewish people or culture. To use a relatively tame example, the Jewish characters all use the word “yid” a lot when referring to themselves or others. I’m sure that Chabon is trying to reclaim the term, the way other minority groups have reclaimed and co-opted derogatory names for themselves. But I don’t have quite the comfort level I need to have with it to read it without cringing a bit.

Complaint Three: Painfully Forced Cleverness
 
The writing is amazingly, annoyingly, self-consciously clever. He particularly likes to use deliberately quirky metaphors and similes, which are everywhere.
 
 Occasionally it sort of works…

“Scraps of newsprint, leaves, and dust get up impromptu games of dreydl in the archways of the houses.”

“His thoughts are a tattoo needle inking the spade on an ace. They are a tornado going back and forth over the same damn pancaked trailer.”

The village is “a row of steel roofs along an inlet, houses jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits.”

But most of the time… not so much. If I may give you just a tiny sample.

“His teeth are like the pipes of an organ made of bones. His laugh sounds like a handful of rusty forks and nail heads clattering on the ground.”

“The knot of his gold-and-green rep necktie presses its thumb against his larynx like a scruple pressing against a guilty conscience.”

“An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.”

“The Sitka Saturday afternoon lies dead as a failed messiah in its winding rag of snow.”

A woman’s snoring “has a double-reeded hum, the bumblebee continuo of Mongolian throat-singing. It has the slow grandeur of a whale’s respiration.”

A motorcycle sounds like “The hacking cough of an old man. A heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp.”

These are often piled one after the other after the other.

The worst part is that every time I encountered one of these gems, it was so distracting that it completely stopped the flow of my reading. In addition to just marveling at its audacity, I’d often have to interpret what the heck it meant. This made it very, very hard to remember what was going on, which in turn made it almost impossible to maintain interest in the story.

If I may use my own simile, it was like riding in a car where the driver keeps randomly applying the brake and then the gas, brake and gas, brake and gas, until you want to scream.

One recurring pattern was for smells to be described in ultra-witty sets of three:

The saunas smell like “chlorine and armpit and a ripe salt vapor that might on second thought have been the pickle factory on the ground floor.”

A sofa gives off “a strong Sitka odor of mildew, cigarettes, a complicated saltiness that is part stormy sea, part sweat on the lining of a wool fedora.”

Standing on the top of his apartment building, “Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at the Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon’s Felting two blocks away.”

Whoops, that last one had four witty smells.

About 100 pages in, it started to become a game: what self-consciously odd combination is he going to come up with this time?

One thing I will give this book is that the cover of the hardcover edition is awesome. It takes key elements of the story – a Verbover’s beard and ringlets, a menorah, a gun, a chess piece – and incorporates them into a Tlingit-style design appropriate to the region.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Parable of the Talents

Octavia Butler
1998
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
 
SPOILER ALERT (For Parable of the Sower)
 
A few years ago I read Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is a prequel to this book. I liked Sower's premise but much of the time I was pretty irritated with the main character, Lauren Olamina, who narrated the story. I thought she was stubborn and annoying. She had also developed her own religion, “Earthseed,” and spent most of her time proselytizing it all over the place.
 
So I was hesitant to read Parable of the Talents. But I am glad I did; I liked it much better than Sower. Talents is partly narrated by Lauren Olamina, again, but it is also partly narrated by her daughter, Larkin, who is a breath of fresh air; she thinks her mother is stubborn and annoying and wishes she’d stop always proselytizing her religion all over the place.
 
The back story (mostly told in Parable of the Sower) is that by the 2030s, for a combination of environmental and political reasons, economic inequality in the US has grown to the point that all middle-class and rich people have to live in iron-walled, guarded sections of cities protected from the chaos and crime and poverty outside. Eventually things outside the walls get so bad that the poor people blast their way in to these citadels; during this revolt, most of the rich and middle-class people are either killed or have to go on the road and scavenge like vagabonds.
 
Lauren Olamina is one of these people. Most of her family is killed during the invasion of their middle-class home in LA but she escapes and makes her way on foot up the coast, gradually collecting a tribe of people around her who buy into her hippyish Earthseed religion. They settle in northern California on her husband's property, start farming and teaching and having kids and making new lives.
 
This is roughly where Sower stops and Talents picks up. Just when things are starting to look comparatively rosy for the Earthseeders, a fascist right-wing president gets elected and his minions come and take over the Earthseed compound (claiming that it is a cult, which it sort of is) and steal all their children and adopt them out to nice Christian households. One of these children is Lauren’s daughter Larkin.
 

The Omega Man

Talents is partly the story of Lauren persevering and rebuilding after the demolition of her Earthseed farm; this part was less interesting to me. But it is also partly the story of Larkin growing up in an adoptive household, achieving her own success, and eventually going to find her biological parents. Larkin is understandably a bit ticked off when she finds out how little Lauren did to find her until many, many years had gone by; Earthseed and the compound were clearly more important to her than her lost child.

The premise of the Parable books is an example of one of my favorite sci-fi sub-genres, in which humanity is all but destroyed by war/disease/rioting/environmental catastrophe and a few survivors are left to band together and make a new civilization while being beset by other humans who want to take what they have and/or control them. There are tons of awesome works of fiction with different takes on this idea (The Stand, The Day of the Triffids, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Omega Man, etc.). One of the best things about science fiction is that you can do this kind of thought experiment and explore the ways people might deal with each other, for good and for ill, when they have next to nothing left.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

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Book Review: Barrayar

Lois McMaster Bujold
1991
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Barrayar was the seventh novel written in Lois McMaster Bujold’s long-running Vorkosigan Saga, but it is one of the very earliest in the saga’s internal chronological order. It lays the groundwork for most of the later books, introducing us to the Vor and explaining the birth and early childhood challenges of Miles Vorkosigan, the saga’s most frequent protagonist.

                                                                                                   

In Barrayar, the story centers around Cordelia Naismith, a brilliant and charming but independent-minded and steely-tough red-haired spaceship captain from the planet Beta. She is married to the brilliant and wise but steely-tough Count Aral Vorkosigan and the two of them are deeply in love with each other. They live on the planet Barrayar in the count’s traditional family home.

Count Vorkosigan is a high-ranking member of the Vor family, which is an elite military caste in the Barrayaran empire. The count becomes arguably the most powerful man on the planet when the elderly emperor dies and the count is appointed regent to Gregor, the emperor’s child successor.

Unfortunately, the empire not only has several enemy states but is also filled with layer upon layer of internal intrigue; Vorkosigan’s new position has earned him the jealousy of several of his Vor kinsmen.

In addition, Barrayar is a somewhat conservative world and the people are constantly being shocked by Cordelia’s Betan egalitarian and feminist sensibilities. She’s constantly being too familiar and unimpressed with important nobles for local custom (but getting away with it because of her aforementioned brilliance and charm).

Needless to say, all of this earns the count and countess many stalwart friends and supporters… as well as many powerful enemies. Eventually, one of their enemies is able to get by security and release a powerful neurotoxin in the Vorkosigan home. It hits Cordelia, who happens to be pregnant at the time.

Doctors are able to rid her of the toxin, but not before it permanently damages her fetus, which will have to be gestated in a uterine replicator for the rest of its term. Then one of the other Vor counts stages a coup, during which the replicator is kidnapped. Most of the rest of the plot of the book involves the battle against the usurper count and the recovery of the replicator.

I never really got caught up in this story. I wasn’t interested in the internecine conflict among the various Vors and the writing was too much like a romance novel for my comfort. There were too many flashing eyes and swirling skirts and unbendingly loyal manservants/armsmen and people being called "Milady." Cordelia was always being called “feisty” and was always drawing criticism from the backwards Barrayans with her modern Betan views and then of course always turning out to be right.

The best part of the book, really, is that it introduces the Vorkosigans’ son, Miles. When Miles is finally born from the replicator, he is very small and has brittle bones that are easily broken; he will never grow to full adult size and will have to live with bone recalcification treatments and physical limitations all of his life. Luckily for him, he is born with the brilliance and steely-toughness of both of his parents, enabling him to overcome his handicaps in spades; this makes for plenty of fodder for the later books in the saga.


An earlier version of this review appeared on Cheeze Blog.