A Canticle for Leibowitz follows the arc of a post-apocalypse humanity, through three story arcs:
- Through the discovery of key artifacts during the new dark ages after a nuclear disaster.
- Another about the struggle for control of information and innovation between scientists and religious scholars
- A third in post apocalypse space age, where interplanetary colonization is possible, but nuclear war turns out to be a repeating cycle rather than a one off event.
Perhaps the highlight of the book was the different characters, who seemed more real and flawed than typical protagonists. Unfortunately by the time I would become invested in any of them, the plot would fast forward by a few hundred years, with hardly a sentence spared about how our main character died an untimely death and was eaten by buzzards. As a remix of history, providing a scenario showing humanity in an apocalypse-rebirth-cycle, but the structure of disjointed stories made it hard to get into and I never really understood what I was supposed to pay attention to in each canto.