Zero gave me this book, and I’ve been reading it on and off being so tied up with work. I remember reading it and feeling I was tossed back into the darker years of the Dark Ages. It’s something I’ve always liked about post-apocalyptic settings: you are forced into a dystopian future which, being dystopian, finds its underpinnings in the worst periods of human history, in this instance reflected in 10th or 11th Century Europe.
What fascinates me about these settings is how authors envision the behaviours of the various actors on the metaphorical stage; intellectually-able but fascinated with preternatural myths, seeing the symbolic in everything, even in the abused, silvered sliver of candy wrapping. Such a “dark age” is not merely a situation bereft of real knowledge and science, but a situation in which the participants are bereft of the intellectual capacity to grasp the possibilities of science beyond myth-making.
(Maybe that’s the point: science begins with myth-making, falsification and objective inquiry be damned. Is this so hard to believe? Aqua Regis, theories about universal solvents, the value of a bezoar, etc.)
A gun is therefore a weapon, but it is viewed as an object alien from the subject’s ability to fully understand its purpose, use or operation - it becomes, merely, an extension just like a hammer is an extension. The complexity of the science of its operation becomes lost in myth: gunpowder may be everything from neo-grecian fire to “holy dust”, a situation where curiosity, sand-blasted by the winds of a thousand nuclear fallouts discovers for the first time its self-imposed, sub-conscious limits.
It’s fascinating, don’t you think? A human being alienated from his own technology is like a human being suddenly forgetting how to speak its mother-tongue: he understands it, but cannot speak it. This isn’t so different from our present situation, though; we know what a handphone does, but we don’t know how it does it - we are alienated from our technology, but in the real world, the potential to discover how things work is ever-present. In a post-apocalyptic world, this potential is non-existent: “advanced” technology becomes mystifying, it becomes less a science and more something divine or arcane.
Then there’s always the question of looming threats. Post-apocalyptic stories always prefigure a future after the fact, after the fulfilment of a “looming threat”, but the moral doesn’t end there. Besides a fascination with how humans would interact in a wasteland of disparate articles and items belonging to a forever-lost past, it’s probably true that most post-apocalyptic stories carry morals about the human condition at its very core: greed, destructive ideologies, lust for power. The looming threat has, and will always be, human existence, and humanity’s capacity for its own self-destruction.
This sort of cynicism infects the core of post-apocalyptic stories, I think. “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is no different in this regard, and is probably one of the first books in this genre that has the distinction of marrying overt tribalism characteristic of organized religion with a nuclear-ravaged present.
