A Canticle for Leibowitz

I don't think I "got" this book. It's supposed to be a cult classic, but I'm obviously not in the cult. It has several motifs I've found in other sci-fi: it is several stories that tell one complete story (like The Martian Chronicles and I, Robot), and it deals with a society that has abandoned books and decided to be illiterate morons (like Fahrenheit 451 and the film Idiocracy).

The premise of the book is that there was a huge flame deluge (nuclear war, see the ending of Terminator 3 if you want an idea of what I imagined it to be like), and the people that were left rebelled against the smart people and burned all the books in a global "simplification." What follows is a United States that is divided into several countries, and the rise of Catholocism as a major power in the world once again.

The focus of the stories is on an abbey in the southwestern desert. The abbey is dedicated to a St. Leibowitz, who founded an order of monks who preserve the written word for the time when Man is ready for it again. Why he is so venerated by the monks (other than being their founder) is unclear. It seems like they only want him to be venerated as a saint for their own personal pride. The back cover of the book also implies that a grocery list written by Leibowitz will be an important object in the book, when really it isn't (remember how hyped Darth Maul was before the Phantom Menace cam out? same thing here).

The stories themselves don't really connect that well. All they really have in common is that they take place at the same abbey, in chronological order over a period of roughly one thousand years. They don't really tell a complete story though, and I think that's because there are too few individual stories to tell a whole. I, Robot does a better job telling a story out of several, and it has nine. the Martian Chronicles has over a dozen short stories put together, and that's the most natural progression of all three books. What this tells me is that the more stories you have, the better the book will flow. A Canticle for Leibowitz doesn't flow from one story to another as naturally because there are hundreds of years in between each one, as opposed to a decade at most. The stories are tied together at the very end, when the most recent main character finds the remains of characters we had learned to know and love (or hate) in the last two stories.

Overall, this was an enjoyable read, and it was interesting, but it could have been done a lot better. It needs more stories to add a better flow to the overall story.