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I like monastic life in fiction- A Canticle for Leibowitz, Name of the Rose, Anathem.. there are many:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/32198.Monasteries_and_Co...

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” is a great book which follows this scenario.

Post apocalyptic technology worship:
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller :)

The world needs more of this stuff.

Here's more interesting material:

Jules Verne's "They Mysterious Island"
http://archive.org/details/mysterious_island_ms_librivox

Walter M. Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
http://archive.org/details/ACanticleForLiebowitz

#1. A 10 part mini-series of Frank Herbert's "Dune" (finally done right by HBO). And after that, the rest of Herbert's Dune saga.

#2. Frank Herbert's "The Eyes of Heisenberg".

#3. Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination".

#4. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter Miller.

#5. Arthur C. Clarke's "The City and the Stars".

I noticed yesterday that someone in the Reddit AMA for the Wikipedia guy with 3M edits randomly recommend he read "A Canticle for Leibowitz".

Favorite books of the year: (I'm primarily a sci fi and short story novel reader)

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang
Like Brothers by Mark and Jay Duplass
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr
Endymion by Dan Simmons
Hyperion by Dan Simmons

A few classics that I'd never read before. Really great year of books for me.

I recently have been reading Hugo Award Novels and recommend Roger Zelazny's This Immortal which is good enough to have shared the award with Dune in 1965. Lord of Light is also a great read and won a Hugo in 1968. Clifford Simak's Way Station, Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, and Walter Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz are other great Hugo novels from the early 1960's that tend to be overshadowed by more famous authors from that period such as Heinlein (not that I wouldn't recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress if you haven't read it).

It was a privilege to work there and definitely the best period of my career. So many wonderful people and experiences in such a short time. I personally consider Brewster Kahle a severely underrated hero of our age. The Archive's work is extremely valuable but I think the value will be appreciated only by a future generation.

As for the book, I think if The Archive had novel for a totem, it'd be "A Canticle For Leibowitz". Very much affected my world view when I read it and this thread has just kindled my interest again. :)

A recent book that I read which really helped my outlook on things business was "Money: The Unauthorized Biography" by Felix Martin. Perhaps my general lack of knowledge in the general area made me feel that the book was profound but it's a good read either way.

If you prefer fiction, I highly recommend "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller Jr. One of my alltime favourite books.

I'm reading Snow Crash at the moment for the first time.

The beginning is actually really tough going as a completely new reader today. It's just so ridiculous. I can see where he was coming from, as I grew up in that era, but it's actually pretty bizarre now given the reality is nation states, religion and banks turned out to be so much more powerful than corporations.

Which is one of the perils of predictions in ageing sci-fi.

I've been on a sci-fi kick recently of all the classics I never read (William Gibson, Ender's Game, The Mars Trilogy, Forever War, Starship Troopers, A Canticle For Leibowitz, Philip K. Dick, Hyperion Cantos, Ringworld) and re-reading some I've not read for a long time (Foundation Series).

I personally found that Snow Crash is by far the most dated book. Even Ringworld and the foundation series were better.

For what it's worth, the following three stories/novels have that effect on me. There's something about them that seems surreal and foreign, a little magical.

- The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster

- Erewhon, Samuel Butler

- The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

The styles and formats are completely different. The only common thing I can think of is that there's this invisible guiding force in all of them, whether it's good or bad. The Machine Stops is a dystopia about technology in absence of a soulful humanity. Erewhon is wild. Truly wild. It has to be a genre all its own, something akin to Darwinian technopunk. The Alchemist is probably one of those novels you could riff on with a yoga instructor and have a good conversation :joy:. It's classical magical surrealism, but it's a good story about a person's lifetime journey. Nothing deep, but it's wholesome.

Edit: also will add A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr., and Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller is my favorite sci-fi short story I’ve read in a long time. It follows an order of Catholic monks in the American southwest many years after a nuclear holocaust. I won’t say more than that.

It was originally just 1 story, Fiat Homo, and then was expanded into a novel. Fiat Homo is freely available in audio form from the BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03w355l/episodes/guide

'A Canticle For Leibowitz' by Walter Miller.

Because it helped bring me to the Catholic faith.

A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter Miller (recommended SF classic)

The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (an old favorite, recommended)

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (some interesting parts, but overall a disappointment)

Theology and Sanity - Frank Sheed (recommended; a very written description of the Catholic faith; weaknesses are it's long and it's aimed to a mid 20th c. audience)

Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensees - Peter Kreeft (recommended; a good exposition of Blaise Pascal's thought)

Catholicism: A journey to the heart of the faith - Robert Barron (recommended; a good explanation of Catholicism for the common person)

His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem (recommended; very intellectual look at the problem of first contact)

The Industries of the Future - Alec Ross (the robotics chapter is best; other parts are more light-weight; easy read)

Clouds of Witnesses - Dorothy Sayers (not my favorite Sayers mystery, but enjoyable)

A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle (recommended)

Why Gender Matters - Leonard Sax (recommended; most of the book is based on good science, but he does go out on a limb a time or two.)

Old School - Tobias Wolff (recommended; a world before widespread TV where high school boys actually got excited about literature)

Infinite Space, Infinite God - Karina and Robert Fabian editors (story quality varies; I enjoyed some of them)

The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle (recommended)

On Stranger Tides - Tim Powers (recommended; I love Powers, but Anubis Gates and Last Call are better. Still, if you like pirates you should like this)

The Art of Worldly Wisdom - Baltasar Gracian (interesting)

Aquinas at Prayer: the Bible, Mysticism, and Poetry - Paul Murray (recommended; this shows a different side of Thomas Aquinas)

Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy - Mortimer Adler (recommended; I almost think this should be required reading)

The Pilgrim's Regress - C.S. Lewis (I enjoyed it, but the ideas Lewis argues against are somewhat dated.)

Edit for formatting

"A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter Miller, Jr.

I would be completely contented with a three- or six-part series, but I could also see it being turned (well) into a longer thing by interpolating.

Similarly, but probably more accessible, "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell (and it's sequel "Children of God"). It would definitely do better as a long series.

--
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

> To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.

In this case, any disaster that prevents the regular maintenance and operation of something like an advanced hospital for at least a few decades. This includes various types of war, energy crises, or the classic SF theme of a society stagnating to point where it can no longer build certain necessary technologies but only operate them.

There's also the related threat to societies/nations that require technology to reproduce. If they get in a war with rivals that can reproduce unassisted, they have extra weak points that can be attacked.

> † See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across.

Any scenario where you have to reconstruct knowledge like that will likely be accompanied by strife that will prevent the reconstruction for a time (of decades or more).

Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?

Burning Chrome, William Gibson

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

A little anecdote that might be interesting here.

I worked at The Archive for a little while and one of the projects I worked on was to unpack about 300 TB of crawl data from the defunct search company cuil.com. It was mostly decent quality data in a standard format and after some grinding, the whole thing was converted into warc files which the wayback machine could use to show the URLs. The end result was that about 60 billion URLs came "back onto the web".

During the work, I was looking at the stones rather than cathedral but after I left and thought about it in detail, it was very satisfying. I was reading the book "A Canticle For Leibowitz" at the time and the general theme of cycles of history was in my head. That dovetailed very well with the work I had done.

If you're interested, you can download the dumps over here https://archive.org/details/cuilcrawl

Past Tense - Lee Child

The Forbidden Door - Dean Koontz

The Crooked Staircase - Dean Koontz

The Outsider - Stephen King

Sleeping Beauties - Stephen King & Owen King

The Fallen - David Baldacci

Zeroes - Chuck Wendig

The Supernatural Enhancements - Edgar Cantero

A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle

Past Tense - Lee Child

The Forbidden Door - Dean Koontz

The Crooked Staircase - Dean Koontz

The Outsider - Stephen King

Sleeping Beauties - Stephen King & Owen King

The Fallen - David Baldacci

Zeroes - Chuck Wendig

The Supernatural Enhancements - Edgar Cantero

A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle

'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem

'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham

'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold

'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman

'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie

'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley

'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly

'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin

'Aratra Pentelici' by John Ruskin

'The Art and Craft of Drawing' by Vernon Blake

'The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci' by Dmitri Merezhkovsky ('romance' in the old sense of 'biographical novel')

'Prehistoric Avebury' by Aubrey Burl

'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller

It was! I looked it up and the summary matches what I remember.

I found the list, it may be missing some poems but this is largely what we covered:

A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr

Arcadia - Tom Stoppard

Dulce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Kindred - Octavia E. Butler

Life of Galileo - Bertolt Brecht

Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw

Suicide in the Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon

The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King

The Lady's Not for Burning - Christopher Fry

The Mortal Immortal - Mary Shelley

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a novel where, after a nuclear war, a Catholic monastery transcribing technical texts (they do not understand) over many generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

Anathem is a Neal Stephenson novel about (again) monastic communities preserving knowledge over hundreds or thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem