A Canticle For Leibowitz - Literary Significance and Reception

Literary Significance and Reception

Initial response to the novel was mixed, but it drew responses from newspapers and magazines normally inattentive to science fiction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was reviewed in such notable publications as Time, The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and The Spectator. While The New Yorker was negative – calling Miller a "dull, ashy writer guilty of heavy-weight irony" – The Spectator’s was mixed. Also unimpressed, Time said, "Miller proves himself chillingly effective at communicating a kind of post-human lunar landscape of disaster," but dubbed it intellectually lightweight. The New York Times Book Review, however, was solid in its praise – Martin Levin hailed A Canticle for Leibowitz as an "ingenious fantasy". The Chicago Tribune gave the book unusual exposure outside the genre in a front page review in the Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books, reviewer Edmund Fuller calling the book "an extraordinary novel". Genre reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised its "many passages of remarkable power." A decade later, Time re-characterized its opinion of the book, calling it "an extraordinary novel even by literary standards, has flourished by word of mouth for a dozen years."

Sales of the hardcover publication were significant enough to justify two additional reprints of the book within the first year, and the novel was recognized with a Hugo Award by science fiction and fantasy fans as the best science fiction novel of 1960.

In the years since, praise for the work has been consistently high. It is considered a "science-fiction classic ... is arguably the best novel written about nuclear apocalypse, surpassing more popularly known books like On the Beach". A Canticle for Leibowitz has also generated a significant body of literary criticism, including numerous literature journal articles, books and college courses. Acknowledging its serialization roots, literary critic David N. Samuelson writes that A Canticle for Leibowitz "may be the one universally acknowledged literary masterpiece to emerge from magazine SF." Fellow critic David Cowart places the novel in the realm of works by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Walker Percy, stating it "stands for many readers as the best novel ever written in the genre." Percy, a National Book Award recipient, declared Canticle "a mystery: it's as if everything came together by some felicitous chance, then fell apart into normal negative entropy. I'm as mystified as ever and hold Canticle in even higher esteem." Scholars and critics have explored the many themes encompassed in the novel, frequently focusing on its motifs of religion, recurrence, and church versus state.

On their CD The Coming Dark Age, the industrial rock band Black Lung have an instrumental track entitled "Leibowitz's Canticle".