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A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller
Despite a slow start, this post-apocalyptic book was very good. An offshoot of the Catholic church keeps scientific & technical documents safe, its members copying documents by hand for centuries even though they don't understand them, waiting for our species to rise from the ashes and for a newer generation of scientists to come looking for knowledge.
My eyes glazed over a bit in the beginning, as the reader is subjected to page after interminable page of life in what appears to be a medieval monastery, with all the dogma, virtuous corporal punishment, and nonsense that goes with that dark era of religious reign. However, the book picked up a good pace afterwards and started skipping centuries, pausing to tell the story of a particular time in the future before skipping centuries again.
The premise was a very interesting one and the turn of events felt realistic. I also liked how nobody is portrayed as a perfect protagonist or pure evil. They are all doing what they can in the situation they find themselves in - the novice who wants to be ordained in the church because that is the only way to literacy and an education or sorts, the bandits born with deformities after what sounds like a nuclear fallout, the abbot who denies a peaceful passing to a fatally wounded child in terrible pain and tries to scare her carer away from euthanasia because his religion forbids it the wannabe scientist who wants to understand the universe so keep learning and inventing but doesn't think about how that invention is going to be used, the countries who engage in an arms race because they don't want to be the only one without defence capabilities.
Everyone is justifiable from their own viewpoint, and we are left with the damning recognition that the problem is the human race. This is what we are and what we will always be - a race of animals who will self-destruct, rise back slowly from the ashes, and self-destruct again, possibly until we annihilate all life on Earth.
The book was published 60 years ago, decades before the Cold War, but feels surprisingly modern and relevant. Very much recommended for everyone here.