The timing on picking this book up for me was wild, as Behind The Bastards just did a 5 part series on "The Men Who Might Have Killed Us All," and both of these works speak to the constant low-grade anxiety I am plagued with living under the nuclear sword of Damocles.

As I write this, the Doomsday Clock is set to 89 seconds to midnight, and even if we somehow manage to avoid blowing ourselves to Kingdom Come, we'll have climate change to contend with, and I don't think we're gonna dodge that bullet. I think Canticle speaks to a world where either eventuality lays us low. Most of the paths ahead of us lead to the vultures eating well.

Act one's protagonist is a cringingly pathetic man who manages, in spite of being the wettest blanket to ever live to leave an indelible mark on the world and his faith. Every page of his arc left me feeling hollow and sad for the waste of the life of a soft and timid mouse, and yet he played his role.

Act two has a large cast of consequence as we navigate the politics of a Neo-rennaissance, humanity growing back into its mantle it nuked itself out of, while the specter of our war-like nature looms over all...

And act three finds us back in a pre-Leibowitzian state: All the world's powers are armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, and itching to have a go at each other, until the inevitable happens. And yet somehow the lives and choices of people in the face of this inevitability still have weight. Yes, yes, Catholics in space or whatever, but the starship is an afterthought to the drama that unfolds on earth in the last days, minutes, seconds before annihilation, not complete, but complete enough.

It's a confusing time to be alive. Perhaps every time is a confusing one. All I know is I grew up watching Star Trek and believing humanity's future was out among the stars, and if we smash-cut to today I think everyone who is trying to get us off this rock is a horrifying ego-maniac who will accelerate our march to a planet-wide mass grave. A world that is, at any given time, seconds away from Mutually Assured Destruction is a very difficult world to be hopeful for, but if the end is inevitable, if the question isn't if, but when, then maybe it becomes easier to live a life of service and principle in the face of all of that.

Bummer, man.