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I very much enjoyed reading this book. It's written in an engaging style that picks you up and draws you along - I found myself page turning and staying up to read one more chapter before bed. Usually a good sign that you've got yourself an engaging read!

The book is a fictionalised alternate history of the British colonial period of the early 19th century. Although it is inescapably told from a 21th century vantage point - the discussions of the characters often use phrases like "lived experience" that are not of their time - I thought it did a great job of setting the scene of the time period with its cruelties, inequalities and contradictions. I was particularly impressed with the setting - the descriptions of Oxford and the way that the author was able to create this feeling of a bubble within the city were especially well done, and the novel was at its best when it was set in and around the Tower of Babel. (I felt that when the narrative left the city it was not quite as strong in general).

I've read a lot of books of the form "character from disadvantaged background is given a chance to do something great, pushes through barriers of discrimination to succeed", to the point where I'm sometimes a bit numb to the formula. Whether or not you think this book is one of those probably hinges on your definition of "success"(!), but for me it neatly subverts the form in a pleasing way.

Characterisation is decent although I did feel that sometimes there was a bit too much explicit that could have been implicit. But one of the things that really stood out was how naturally the main friendship group was written. I thought the author did an excellent job of exploring how different personalities can fit together within a small group of friends.

It's very tempting to review books like this by analogy - you can see elements from authors like Susannah Clarke, Mary Gentle and JK Rowling. But ultimately I think this book is best described on its own merits. Its got a great setting and builds to a tense climax. It has an interesting point of view on the colonial time-period and manages to tell a fresh and satisfying story with it (rather than just making a point). Can recommend!

I really wanted to enjoy this book. At times it reminded me a lot of a classic Peter F Hamilton story - an interesting geopolitical backdrop, an unusual alien biome to explore, some well sketched characters. Perhaps because of that, I thought I was going to get a sprawling space opera played out on a grand scale. And then just when it was starting to get good, the book ended, leaving me feel a bit let down! I think the problem is in the comparison - a truly Hamiltonian book would have been three times as long and several more plot twists along the way. Maybe at some point I'll pick up the remaining books in the series and see if it gives me what I was craving.

The technology that drives the book is the FTL Submarine. On the surface a weird combination, but Macleod does have a good justification - the geopolitical order of Macleod's world has split into three secretive factions (broadly the Commonwealth + USA, Europe, and Russia + China), and none of them want the others to notice when they send their ships to other worlds. So they load their FTL drives onto submarines and send them off to far flung star systems instead. It's not a technology that has a lot of social implications in and of itself though, it's just there.

Possibly more interesting is Macleod's vision of an AI-assisted future. Each of the three blocs has their own perspective on how AI usage should be regulated, with Europe (plus Scotland but minus the rest of the UK) choosing a path of dependence on AI planning (after some kind of Socialist Revolution called "The Rising") while the Anglosphere seems to have put more effort into building sentient robots that can pass as human. People in Europe have access to an AI helper called "Iskander" that anticipates their needs and does stuff for them. The book poses some interesting questions about human agency in the face of something that knows what you want before you ask.

Also there is some mysterious alien technology lying around. I love reading about alienness - I think there's a rich vein of introspective thought that comes out of trying to work out what it would be like to meet and interact with non-human intelligences. Here there's a bit of that, but just as it was starting to kick into gear I reached the end :(. Shame too because it could have been quite interesting.

So in summary, enjoyable but was left unsatisfied by how it finished (and a touch sceptical about some of the physics, but not a big deal).

I love reading old science fiction! Finding out how people in the past thought about how the world would be in the future is often a great window into the preoccupations of the day. You learn about the things they thought would be forever, and how the technologies and progress they haven't been exposed to changed their world view. Through this lens, A Canticle for Leibowitz is an interesting insight into the 1950s and the beginnings of the Cold War.

The central strand running through the book is that even if you send humanity back to a pre-technological state through a nuclear war, it would redevelop along similar lines to how it did the first time. We are introduced to a world that is a post-apocalyptic wasteland and follow humanity as it re-establishes itself in the new world. In a series of vignettes we see three points in time in this re-development - loosely, a "Dark Ages", "Renaissance" and "Modern" story, all focused on a Catholic abbey that has made it its mission to preserve pre-apocalypse knowledge.

It was an interesting choice to make the Catholic Church so central to the tale. Seen from the 2020s this seems quite incongruous - while the church is still a key part of many people's lives, it does not have the same centrality to public life that it perhaps used to (certainly to me a lot of the Latin phrasing and way of thinking felt quite alien!). In a more modern retelling you might expect that the beliefs espoused by the "church" would be altered beyond recognition (or at least, only the faintest outline of the original would remain), whereas here the Christian stories come through with only minor alterations. Perhaps the author could not imagine a world without Christian thought?

The spectre of the Cold War hangs heavily over the book, both in terms of the anxiety surrounding nuclear weapons and the way that states in the "Modern" section end up coalescing into a similar situation. It's quite a common trope that seems to dominate science fiction from the period - perhaps understandably if you view science fiction as a genre as an attempt to isolate and distil particular aspects of the present in ways that allow you to discuss them in an more interesting way.

There's a degree of helplessness in the way that the author describes how information about impending nuclear war is shared that felt quite different from how such a story would be told today as well. The point of view makes it clear that it is understood that what people are being told is propaganda, but there is no way for them to discern the underlying truth. I wonder if this way of looking at the world has been shattered by the advent of social media - now there is more information than you could possibly sift through rather than one authoritative story you must choose to believe or reject, and the problem is very different.

Overall I felt that the writing was quite uneven across the three stories. The middle one was definitely the best, with well developed characters and an interesting plot. I felt that the first and final stories were a bit lacking in that respect, particularly the last, which devoted a lot of time to debating the morality of euthanasia in a manner that felt like a thinly veiled abortion debate (although I suppose it's interesting to see someone's point of view from the 50s on the matter).

I found it worth reading to try and get that reflected glow of 1950s thought, but I probably wouldn't recommend this to someone unless they enjoy old sci-fi or have an interest in the Catholic Church. I understand it's quite an influential book (and I could believe that in 1959 this was pretty groundbreaking!), but there have been many other post-apocalyptic novels written since that are tighter and tell a more coherent and interesting story. Nevertheless, an interesting experience to read!