On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

Definitely one of my favorites, too. There's an elegiac quality to it that I haven't quite seen in any other novel.

I have a number of quotations jotted down from it, but since this a tech site I'll restrict myself to sharing this one that I sometimes think of when dealing with a recalcitrant machine or mysterious bug:

        "That contraption--listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't
    believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying
    soul. Can the principle of a 'thinking machine'--man-made--be a rational
    soul? Blah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know
    what?"
        "Father?"
        "Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think!
    It knows good and evil I tell you, and it chose the later."

> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy).

Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put off kids because they care about overpopulation), or topsoil availability, or fresh water availability (climate change contributes but we're also using way too much), or garbage in the ocean, or the decimation of life in the ocean (which climate change isn't helping but it's more from overfishing), etc etc etc.

That's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure I can hunt down a lot more.

And it's super dependent on where you live too. Try telling Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, Syrians, Yemenis, Lebanese, etc. if they're better off now than they were in the past.

This indeed is a lovely book, one of my very favorites, and one of the most influential science fiction novels written. Maybe only Vonnegut was able to match the combination of grimness and humor.

Walter M Miller Jr was a Catholic, and it helps to see the book through that particular blend of hopeless original sin and joyful redemption. He, and many of his characters, believed in both. It's a sensitive portrayal of people who are deeply religious for principled reasons, yet don't fall into easy caricature.

It's the only novel that he ever wrote. He published a couple dozen short stories, many of which are worth reading. Several are available here -- https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Walter%20M._Miller,%20J...

His notes for a "Canticle" sequel were stitched together after his death into "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman," but that's not even a patch on the original. Terry Bisson did much of the work, and I'm sure it was hard. Where "Canticle" is humane and sharp and focused, "Wild Horse Woman" is perfunctory and scattered and meandering.

That was true in 2010. In 2020 things are getting worse.

Is it a blip? Maybe. But the first measured decline in life expectancy was measured in 2015, and there have been declines in half the years since then.

The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to keep the middle class workers content, optimistic and most importantly, compacent. 'Don't look up' style.

All these arguments explicitly ignore the many elephants in the room, like the global fucking pandemic we've been mishandling for the past two years or the climate disaster which is already making itself felt by westerners.

The outcome is actually pretty grim if you read between the lines. You don't have to monitor the news or social media to figure out that we're not in the best place right now when it comes to a lot of global metrics. We can pick and chose a couple and make ourselves feel good and go about our business being productive little bees in the capitalist machine, but we're just fooling ourselves.

My personal assessment is that the effects of climate change will zero out a lot of those measures for which we're doing better than our forefathers.