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!