A (New Yorker) Canticle for Leibowitz

The excellent Charlie Panayiotou, film, manga and anime maven and Gollancz editor wrangler extraordinaire draws our attention to an excellent appreciation of Walter M. Miller Jr’s Hugo Award-winning classic A Canticle for Leibowitz in The New Yorker . . .

One of the American airmen who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino was a young radio operator and tail gunner from Florida named Walter M. Miller, Jr. Miller, who enlisted in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, flew on more than fifty combat missions in B-25 Mitchells above the Mediterranean region and the Balkans. Following the war, he got married, studied engineering at the University of Texas, and converted to Catholicism. In the fifties, he began publishing stories and novellas in Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Astounding Science Fiction, and other magazines.

You can read the full article at The New Yorker‘s website.

Gollancz recently published a new SF Masterworks hardback edition of A Canticle for Leibowitz, with a customarily-excellent introduction by Ken MacLeod. You can read about Walter M. Miller Jr in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and read Jon Courtenay Grimwood‘s insightful SFX Book Club article on A Canticle for Leibowitz on this very site.