A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).
I played Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics with my now deceased sister's friends when I was way too young to appreciate half the humor. I cherish these memories.
... and sometimes when I end up in bad parts of various cities, certain dive bars, etc. I think about the "Cafe of Broken Dreams". :)
Really burying the lede here! :)
I loved that game, and I'm not completely surprised to hear that A Canticle For Leibowitz had that kind of influence. Fallout was very much its own thing, but Children of the Cathedral had that same postapocalyptic monk vibe.
Of course the most passionate ones among us will have already found material from Tim Cain (the speeches). We would be grateful for your stories. Already this bit of info about Canticle for Leibowitz, Road Warrior (the sequel to Mad Max, right?) and Jeunet-and-Caro's La Cité is quite precious.
> "A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children)."
Just about at the end of Speaker for the Dead. A Canticle for Leibowitz was the first ones that I really enjoyed. Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are up there too but my absolute favorite so far is Dreamsnake.
I'm really annoyed at myself for not reviewing or at least jotting down some notes about the books as I've finished them. I remember liking Canticle a lot but I would be hard pressed to summarize it without some help.
We started with Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" in 1992. Tim Cain had gotten the CD-ROM version and it was the first ebook I read. Then we went back to the first Hugos and tried to read them in order. We had to go on scavenger hunts through used book stores to find some of the titles. I think we finished our book club with The Doomsday Book.
So, thanks for the indirect recommendation!
Only because I rarely hear either of those mentioned at all, unlike Canticle.
The Road, McCarthy
And in a different sort of apocalypse:
Nueromancer, Gibson
Too bad the Aeon got the Black Sun (bad name choice?)... I support Cybran and going autonomous, like what is wrong with Aeon: they are like the Illuminati from scripture but just retarded from Eastasian evil.
One question, is City of Lost Children the French movie by Jeunet or something else?
Walter M Miller Jr was a Catholic, and it helps to see the book through that particular blend of hopeless original sin and joyful redemption. He, and many of his characters, believed in both. It's a sensitive portrayal of people who are deeply religious for principled reasons, yet don't fall into easy caricature.
It's the only novel that he ever wrote. He published a couple dozen short stories, many of which are worth reading. Several are available here -- https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Walter%20M._Miller,%20J...
His notes for a "Canticle" sequel were stitched together after his death into "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman," but that's not even a patch on the original. Terry Bisson did much of the work, and I'm sure it was hard. Where "Canticle" is humane and sharp and focused, "Wild Horse Woman" is perfunctory and scattered and meandering.
I don't share the view of this post's author that Miller was saying nuclear holocaust is an inevitable result of the human condition.
Rather, I see Canticle as the Catholic interpretation of the contemporary American cultural belief that fiery nuclear war was coming soon -- the gestalt embodied in, say, Tom Lehrer singing "We Will All Go Together When We Go".
Given that society feels that way, Miller asks -- how did we get there? Where might we go next? And how do we reckon with the concepts of sin and grace in this wholly alien future we seem to have suddenly entered?
On that note, I couldn’t help but read the book as a critique of the Protestant reformation.
What does this mean? Why the difference between the measurable state of the world and the doomer discourse? I think its rooted in two things.
The first reason is that both social media and news media are monetized by your attention, and attention is far higher when things are presented as terrible than when things are presented as good. Bad news goes viral far better than good news.
The second reason is that being highly online is correlated with depression. The people who are most likely to be spending their time posting online are more likely to be depressed and lose perspective about the world around them.
What's the solution? I don't know for sure but I think a good first step is to limit the time you spend consuming news media and social media, and instead spend time offline living life. What's the point of a constant stream of information if it leads to inaccurate perceptions of the world?
"Notable" is quite the understatement IMHO.
Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put off kids because they care about overpopulation), or topsoil availability, or fresh water availability (climate change contributes but we're also using way too much), or garbage in the ocean, or the decimation of life in the ocean (which climate change isn't helping but it's more from overfishing), etc etc etc.
That's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure I can hunt down a lot more.
And it's super dependent on where you live too. Try telling Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, Syrians, Yemenis, Lebanese, etc. if they're better off now than they were in the past.
I agree it depend on where you are, but if you look at the globe in its entirety, things look even better than if you restrict your view to the US.
I would note in my own life we waited a long time to have a kid because we wanted to be engaged in our careers early on. Once we had a kid we decided to stop simply because we enjoyed the focus on our daughter and didn’t see having a ton of kids as a social imperative. That puts our family at below replacement rate. My experience isn’t particularly unique among the parents I know, and we are actually younger than many.
I know all of the above is anecdotal and conjecture, but I’m fairly confident if I did my normal citation and data collection I would largely be supported (having seen the data and analysis in the past) but I’m sick and have too little energy right now.
Just as the Gibson quote went: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed"
All these arguments explicitly ignore the many elephants in the room, like the global fucking pandemic we've been mishandling for the past two years or the climate disaster which is already making itself felt by westerners.
The outcome is actually pretty grim if you read between the lines. You don't have to monitor the news or social media to figure out that we're not in the best place right now when it comes to a lot of global metrics. We can pick and chose a couple and make ourselves feel good and go about our business being productive little bees in the capitalist machine, but we're just fooling ourselves.
My personal assessment is that the effects of climate change will zero out a lot of those measures for which we're doing better than our forefathers.
However, economic growth is currently tied to exploiting finite resources with ever increasing speed. Consequently, all measures that look at natural resources give rise to increasing existential angst: The oceans are empty, biodiversity is crashing; the climate is messed up, likely beyond the point where we can prevent catastrophic warming; topsoil is eroding at an amazing rate, aquifers are depleting; plastics, and other "forever chemicals" keep accumulating with as of yet mostly unknown effects.
So while the economy keeps growing, it looks like we're just increasing the speed at which we'll hit the wall.
Our awareness of the potential for collapse is absolutely crucial. We have agency. We can nudge our systems. Postpone catastrophic outcomes for another day.
Humanity will always be kicking the can down the road. There is no stable state.
--
I don't know what to do or say about fatigue, burnout, and apathy due to chronic doomsaying. For my part, I've pulled back. No corporate media. No politics with friends and family. Started journalling. Prioritized my life and try to stick to the plan. Sometimes successfully.
Is it a blip? Maybe. But the first measured decline in life expectancy was measured in 2015, and there have been declines in half the years since then.
Is this really true? Some democracies are under pressure (USA for example), but for example easter europe wasn't a democracy not so long ago. I don't really know what's going on in Africa. How many democracies are developing there vs backsliding?
It's a wild ride and I think a book people should read.
My fav quote,
"When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.”
I have a number of quotations jotted down from it, but since this a tech site I'll restrict myself to sharing this one that I sometimes think of when dealing with a recalcitrant machine or mysterious bug:
"That contraption--listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't
believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying
soul. Can the principle of a 'thinking machine'--man-made--be a rational
soul? Blah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know
what?"
"Father?"
"Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think!
It knows good and evil I tell you, and it chose the later."It's a lovely quote too. I remember reading the novel and thinking, 'Holy shit, he's hit the nail on the head!'
I'd happily run a class on it. Whenever anyone asks for a reading list, it's often on there.
I take the novel as a mystic work, much like Meister Eckhart's works. It's a pendulum swing between the secular and the sacred.
Yet evidence pointing to this outcome was all around us during the Cold War, right up to the late 1980s. Development of new and more potent weapons. Serious accidents or near accidents - one crazy one I remember hearing about was one side almost launching a retaliatory barrage when the radar gave a false positive for an incoming attack. Proxy wars. Opaque succession plans in the USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Sabre-rattling and standoffs all over the world.
In elementary school in the 1970s we didn't have to do "Duck and Cover" but we did have drills involving classes marching in a line down to the basement which had signs marking it as a "Fallout Shelter." Sometimes I still see them. (History: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/01/23/local-news/what-do-thos...)
When I got a little older, I can't tell you how unsettling it was to see serious looking people talking on the nightly news about some incident on the North Korean border, or a power struggle in Moscow after Brezhnev died, or how many thousands of ICBMs each side had pointing at each other. How fucked up is it that 15 year old me understood concepts like MIRV (https://armscontrolcenter.org/multiple-independently-targeta...) or the U.S. maintaining a bunch of B-52s loaded with nukes in the air at all times?
The news we saw and read was reinforced through pop culture that drove home the idea that we would blow ourselves to bits. In high school in the mid-1980s we were assigned Canticle as well as Neville Shute's On The Beach, which follows a similarly depressing narrative (northern hemisphere covered by radiation, southern slowly dying off, what people do as the inevitable gets closer). Red Dawn. Firefox. Reruns of Dr. Strangelove. Or the TV series The Day After.
We couldn't believe it when crowds climbed on the Berlin Wall in November 1989. That's when people were able to rub their eyes and think just maybe we weren't going to kill ourselves.
(It turned out to be a dam failure caused by flooding, and they were trying to warn everyone downstream to get out now. Nothing to do with nuclear war.)
Crazy times. 1960 - 1968 The United States flew nuclear armed bombers to the borders of the USSR 24 hours a day.
Imagine if 'insert country name' flew armed bombers to the border of 'insert western country name' every day in 2022.
US jets intercept and turn them around.
It's the expensive version of the border crossings between India & Pakistan
Agreed. Things aren't actually all that bad right now. When compared to most of history things are really pretty damn good. Sure there's the pandemic, but as pandemics go... well, there have been much worse. And yet a lot of people want to see it all burn. I really don't understand this sentiment. What makes them think that something better will arise out of the ashes?
This article is pretty typical of the genre "unhappy leftists ask why people inexplicably reject their utopia". As per usual no real political analysis is provided, just the cleverly worded implication that people who disagree with the preferred direction don't really have political views, just atavistic destructive tendencies. That they want to "watch it all burn". It's flattering to the ego to believe that other people are just vastly intellectually inferior, of course, but not very intellectually interesting for observers.
To wit, the core of the author's thesis is that with the threat of nuclear war receding, "Capitalism and liberal democracy had won, and nothing would ever really challenge this staus quo again. That thesis has now unraveled so obviously that nobody claims we are at the “end of history” anymore, and this book is remarkable only for the hubris it embodied. Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden."
This sounds clever but is devoid of any meaning or detail. It's a New York Times cliché, not actual analysis of the world you could learn anything from. And because it's so thin we can easily spin it around.
Consider Trump. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is about a world post-nuclear apocalypse. Trump is cast as somehow equivalent or similar to this. But let us recall the alternative voters were given! I remember the original presidential debates, and it was Trump's opponent who wanted to create a no-fly zone over Syria i.e. start a hot war with the nuclear armed Russians! And it was Trump who stood against that and said no way, we're not doing that, we're not starting a hot war with Russia over Syria. So you could argue that the voters stood up for Eden in that moment by saying: no, getting the first woman president is not enough to offset the risk of nuclear war. A serious analysis that linked A Canticle with modern political events should really consider that sort of thing, but this article isn't such an analysis. It's instead the usual cry of pain of those committed to unaccountable managerial technocratism, wondering why the savages inexplicably reject their benevolent rule.
As for his actual motivations, I think it had a lot more to do with wanting to make money in Russia as well as his admiration of autocrats.
> People are usually pretty rational on close inspection.
Large groups of people can be agitated and manipulated into being very irrational. Plenty of examples from history.
A couple I highly recommend from another Catholic author, The Lord of the World, and Dawn of All, by Robert Hugh Benson.
Those two are more early 20th century Catholicism in worldview, which I particularly enjoyed.
Great tip, I'm going to order these now.
“Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. ‘You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'”
“Never tell a child you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body. As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.” George Macdonald 1892 ("Friends" here is a reference to Quakers)
via https://books.google.com/books?id=vDMrAAAAYAAJ&dq=george+mac...
h/t https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-have-a-soul-cs-lewis-neve...
[https://archive.org/details/NPRPresentsACANTICLEFORLIEBOWITZ...]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
Richard Mathesson books are good, I think I am Legend is the one I read first and then started looking out for others in this series.
Swastika Night was probably the most mind-blowing.
With respect to the ‘Fall of Rome/Dark Ages’ narrative I had Pico della Mirandola and Edward Gibbon in mind.
Considering their takes on monasticism, I suppose monasticism as the savior of civilization was actually a much later add on.
When things are not so bad, it's not as clear what is still wrong and what would be progress, and everyone disagrees and those disagreements become the new worst thing.
Didn't love it. Not alot really happened in it.
It felt like a response/commentary to the sort of apocalypse that was envisaged in the 1980's, like nuclear war. I feel like there's a much more sophisticated post apocalyptic vision of the future now.
As an alternative, I loved "The Road" - now there's a really great post apocalyptic scifi.
I the book Capitalist Realism recently, and it had an interesting section that observed modern society tends to confuse bleakness and depravity with "being realistic."
The nuclear holocaust wasn't really a prediction of that book; it was a premise.
Maybe last year, but we're back to nuclear sabre-rattling and great-power conflict now.
The book itself is literature. To see it as a prediction and especially as a failed prediction seems simpleminded (in the techie-futurist way).
The premise of the book is that technological progress coupled with original sin means humanity is doomed to endlessly repeat genocide against itself and the Earth.
In other words, we have this hardware-level bug that bubbles to the surface every couple of generations, and the undercurrent of technological progress means that each time it pops there's more technology to put to work against the "other" (also known as "the self", in a broader context).
It's hard to look at these ingredients and not agree that the extrapolated recipe is as likely as it is disturbing.
I disagree with the author of this post, in that "kicking" is a very rational response for many people, especially today. The comfort of the author's Eden is paid for by the regrettable suffering of so many people; and they have very few political avenues express it through. Those people are entitled to kick. Wealth and comfort ought to be distributed at a higher pace that isn't so dependent on GDP growth.
I'm optimistic, I think there's enough wealth in the world to solve these problems. But the stickiness of greed around wealth means it'll take some kicking to get us there.
“Green indicates a new account.”
> Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden.
like okay, those legit aren't great, but don't we face substantially bigger threats from, oh, IDK, Putin's Russia and what may yet be an ascendant China?? Maybe the way we approach these matters, as if sleepwalking, has as much to do with destruction we suffer as any overt impulses towards destruction.
(Also, the people kicking Eden apart usually aren't the most-comfortable ones, but the resentful ones a few rungs down.)
Now, I think that this is a terrible perspective to have so I didn't like the book at all. And I have other beefs with it. But the book was never claiming that countries wouldn't invade each other or that there wouldn't be terrorist attacks or that significant events like that wouldn't continue to happen.