Beyond Armageddon
from Bison Books
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul Hughes
Deep in the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz has miraculously discovered the relics of the martyr Isaac Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred shopping list. They may provide a ray of hope in a terrifying age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. As the mystery unfolds, it is the search for meaning, for truth, and for love, that offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.
"Angry and eloquent...a terrific story." (New York Times)
Saint Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller
from Orbit
This is the 30-years-in-coming sequel to Walter M. Miller's seminal work, A Canticle for Leibowitz. It chronicles the odyssey of Brother Blacktooth St. George, a fallen monk of the Leibowitz order who becomes secretary to the politically ambitious Cardinal Brownpony. Brownpony is involved in a complex scheme to break the rule of the Hannegan Empire, which dominates the 35th-century's post-apocalypse world. Even though Brownpony's plans will ultimately restore both the world and the declining Papacy to some form of order, he is not a religious man, although he is drawn to those who are. He sees something profoundly religious in Blacktooth, who on the surface seems to be a disgraced monk foundering in confusion because of his love for a woman, his semi-pagan visions of the Virgin Mary, and his nomadic heritage. Ultimately it seems that Brownpony's--and indeed humanity's--salvation may lie with Blacktooth, who will never quite realize how great is the gift he's been given.
It has been nearly forty years since Walter M. Miller, Jr., shocked and dazzled readers with his provocative bestseller and enduring classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Now, in one of the most eagerly awaited publishing events of our time, here is Miller's masterpiece, an epic intellectual and emotional tour de force that will stand beside 1984, Brave New World, and A Canticle for Leibowitz.
In a world struggling to transcend a terrifying legacy of darkness--a world torn between love and violence, good and evil--one man undertakes an odyssey of adventure and discovery that promises to alter not only his destiny but the destiny of humankind as well. . . .
Millennia have passed since the Flame Deluge, yet society remains fragmented, pockets of civilization besieged by barbarians.  The Church is in turmoil, the exiled papacy struggling to survive in its Rocky Mountain refuge.  To the south, tyranny is on the march.  Imperial Texark troops, bent on conquest, are headed north into the lands of the Nomads, spreading terror in their wake.
Meanwhile, isolated in Leibowitz Abbey, Brother Blacktooth St. George suffers a crisis of faith.  Torn between his vows and his Nomad upbringing, between the Holy Virgin and visions of the Wild Horse Woman of his people, he stands at the brink of disgrace and expulsion from his order.  But he is offered an escape--of sorts: a new assignment as a translator for Cardinal Brownpony, which will take him to the contentious election of a new pope and then on a pilgrimage to the city of New Rome.  Journeying across a continent divided by nature, politics, and war, Blacktooth is drawn into Brownpony's intrigues and conspiracies.  He bears witness to rebellion, assassination, and human sacrifice.  And he is introduced to the sins that monastery life has long held at bay.
This introduction comes in the form of AEdrea, a beautiful but forbidden "genny" living among the deformed and mutant castouts in Texark's most hostile terrain.  As Blacktooth encounters her again and again on his travels--in the flesh, in rumors of miraculous deeds, and in the delirium of fever--he begins to wonder if AEdrea is a she-devil, the Holy Mother, or the Wild Horse Woman herself.
Picaresque and passionate, magnificent, dark, and compellingly real, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is a brutal, brilliant, thrilling tale of mystery, mysticism, and divine madness, a classic that will long endure in every reader's memory.
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