Stefen’s Bookclub – September

A Canticle for Liebowitz
by Walter M Miller Jr

When I set this book for earlier in the year I hadn’t expected it to be quite so appropriate. I also had no idea I’d be running the club online via Zoom, but there you are. There’s so much in this book that it seemed a shame that we didn’t get to do it properly with a full house, so it’ll be our first ‘do-over’. I’d decided on and ordered the book months before Covid and lockdown, but then it happened and now it looks like a choice made based on current affairs rather than me just wanting to chat about some old science fiction. It’s funny how the present can change the way you perceive the past, which coincidentally is one of the themes of this book. Covering a thousand or so years after a nuclear apocalypse (the book was written in 1959) it begins with humanity’s struggle to rebuild and as time passes to understand their past. Then we follow the progress of this new society across centuries and the effects that a few mostly misunderstood artefacts and ideas of the destroyed twentieth century have on them. Actually, it’s so much more than this, but the point of bookclub is discussion and discovery and this will have plenty of both.