I read this because it was selected as the Book of Honor for this year's Potlatch science fiction & fantasy convention. I had read it before, when I was in high school or college, and had a vague memory of liking it at the time. The novel is set in a world where nuclear war happened sometime in the 1940s or 1960s, with the action opening after enough generations have passed that there is no one alive to remember the world before and literacy is almost zero. The book seems to be shaped by the Cold War, China's Cultural Revolution, and Miller's Catholic faith. It was inspired by his experience in WWII, bombing an ancient abbey. Miller was a short story writer, and this book came about by modifying two long short stories, and then adding the last third of the book. The action takes place in and around an abbey in the southwest, where an order of monks preserves knowledge from before the nuclear war -- books, blueprints, shopping lists, and any fragment of paper with writing on it.[return][return]This time, I did quite like the first two sections of the book. Earnest Brother Francis, the mad poet, and the desert pilgrim (or whatever he is) Benjamin were interesting. The abbot in the second section is tough, open-minded and humane. I didn't enjoy the last section, with the authoritarian Abbot Zerchi and lots of theological arguing. Ordering a dying woman to "offer up" her suffering, and when verbal orders fail, physically preventing her from seeking euthanasia didn't strike me as high-minded -- though I suppose it's possible that Miller intended this as criticism of the church, too.[return][return]MIller seems to be simultaneously of the opinion that man will inevitably destroy the world with nuclear war as soon as it become technically feasible, but at the same time he ends with people going into space to create new worlds with hope. The space ship seems tacked-on, though.