A Canticle for Leibowitz was the Bomb (poor showing for the final post I know, but puns for this one were hard)

I’m just going to start off by saying that I really enjoyed A Canticle for Leibowitz and that it will definitely be joining the list of my favorite books. This is especially surprising, considering a google search of “Science Fiction Books” and some looking at Wikipedia entries is all that it took to find it. The book's comments on its time period are interesting, it feeds into the year-long question of what defines a sci-fi novel, and through it all, it managed to tell an engaging story.

A Canticle for Leibowitz was first published in 1959, just a couple of years after the development of the hydrogen bomb, and just a couple of years before the largest bomb ever bomb test. It also concurred with the very beginnings of the space race (Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957) so this would be the time period when it was being made very clear by both the US and the USSR that bomber aircraft were no longer required to destroy entire cities.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is against the further development and dispersal of nuclear weapons. At the beginning of the book civilization is ended in roughly 1960 by greedy heads of state and at the end of the book despite 200 years of relative peace, all it takes is two nations having a minor dispute to start a nuclear war and re-end civilization after it’s previous 1800 year recovery period. This seems to be fully against the principle of nuclear peace and behind the idea that if humans have the capability to destroy each other they will. The book was not alone in its sentiments during this time period as just around when it was published nuclear disarmament campaigns began to grow in number, although they were generally unsuccessful. (For good news they were successful in South Africa, which dismantled its nuclear weapons in 1989.)
The next thing that I wanted to talk about was why A Canticle for Leibowitz is classified as a science fiction novel. At no point in time during the novel is any technology that we don’t have today used. The farthest that they get is a rocket that is capable of bringing its crew (or their children’s children’s... children’s children) to another star, but we could actually do this if we were willing to spend trillions on a rocket an order of magnitude larger than the Saturn 5 and strap some people on top of it.

In my science fiction definitional paper, however, I argued that future technology was not necessarily a must and that a dystopia or very changed political system could also make a book science fiction. For examples of this, I used The Dispossessed and The Hunger Games, both of which have at least modern levels of technology unlike the majority of A Canticle for Leibowitz. For this reason, I would probably move it to the fantasy section. At least for me, it feels as if just a small amount of modern day technology at the end of a book doesn’t justify it being called science fiction, and the rest of the book fits a lot better in the fantasy genre.

This really begs the question of whether or not, as technology advances, books should be moved out of the science fiction section and into the fantasy or some other section. In my personal opinion, it should probably be on a case by case basis. Some books, like those of Jules Verne, just are science fiction at their core with the main point being to speculate on technology and methods, while others like A Canticle for Leibowitz use some elements of science fiction to create a setting, through which they can make a point. In my opinion, the former should stay science fiction no matter how much technology has evolved, while the latter should be moved when the time comes. There are some kinks in this method, such as books like Red Mars, which are clearly supposed to have a message but also heavily speculate on future technology. I would probably just put a copy of the book in both sections and be done with it, but the solution to this problem is negligible and has been left as an exercise to the reader.