“A Canticle for Leibowitz”, by Walter M. Miller, Jr

The book’s first novella, “Fiat Homo” (“Let there be Man”), is set at a monastery in the Utah desert some six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust known as the Flame Deluge. The war caused a backlash against learning and knowledge, called the Simplification, which wiped out almost all traces of civilization. Most of the people on earth are illiterate. Many are deformed by radiation. The monks who reside in the monastery are devoted to honoring the memory of Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist at Los Alamos who was martyred for his efforts to safeguard scientific knowledge in the aftermath of the conflict. They collect and transcribe the “Leibowitz Memorabilia,” including shopping lists, technical documents, and circuit diagrams that they cannot even begin to understand.