On “A Canticle for Leibowitz” | Hacker News Reader

On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

loukidelis.com

190 pointsfromwilliam141 comments

In the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites.

A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).

Chris, I just want you to know that Fallout was the epitome of my entire gaming life, and one of the highlights of my teen years.

I played Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics with my now deceased sister's friends when I was way too young to appreciate half the humor. I cherish these memories.

... and sometimes when I end up in bad parts of various cities, certain dive bars, etc. I think about the "Cafe of Broken Dreams". :)

Thank you for playing! I appreciate your kind words.

I'm old enough that Total Annihilation is my favorite game all time. Still remember the wonder of discovering that. Thank you for all the happy memories.

TA is awesome! I'd love to take credit for it, but that's a different Chris Taylor.

:-) Sorry for the mistake. I also love Fallout, but not so much the later ones. I played Fallout 1 and 2 a lot, but never enjoyed the recent ones so much. I guess I am too old to enjoy the latest trends.

(The Canadian is an homonym! There are two in the industry. This is the Californian. Were it otherwise, Fallout would have been set in the cold and the inspiring movie would have been Fargo.)

That's quite a coincidence, two of the genre defining games when I was growing up was made by two people with the same name :-)

> A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout

Really burying the lede here! :)

I loved that game, and I'm not completely surprised to hear that A Canticle For Leibowitz had that kind of influence. Fallout was very much its own thing, but Children of the Cathedral had that same postapocalyptic monk vibe.

Chris, why don't you write a history of how Fallout was born, from your perspective?

Of course the most passionate ones among us will have already found material from Tim Cain (the speeches). We would be grateful for your stories. Already this bit of info about Canticle for Leibowitz, Road Warrior (the sequel to Mad Max, right?) and Jeunet-and-Caro's La Cité is quite precious.

I wouldn't mind reading an autobiographical take on the development of Fallout, Icewind Dale, etc, and your life up to now.

+1!

  > "A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children)."

No wonder I got crazy "Canticle" vibes from the Brotherhood when playing Fallout.

That's amazing, thank you for creating that. Some of my favorite parts of the Fallout series were the little slices of frozen catastrophe hidden off in corners, piles of bones and old clothing and a suitcase full of items that told half a story. I read that book after I had played Fallout and it felt so familiar because of it.

I've been reading it recently for the first time and it didn't quite click that it was an influence on Fallout, but it makes a lot of sense. I realize I've been kind of imagining scenes from FO3 while reading. (Though I understand we're talking about Fallout 1 and 2 here, and the further games were made by different people.)

I'm doing the Hugo list now!

Just about at the end of Speaker for the Dead. A Canticle for Leibowitz was the first ones that I really enjoyed. Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead are up there too but my absolute favorite so far is Dreamsnake.

I'm really annoyed at myself for not reviewing or at least jotting down some notes about the books as I've finished them. I remember liking Canticle a lot but I would be hard pressed to summarize it without some help.

Reading all the Hugos is a fascinating tour through sci-fi across the years.

We started with Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" in 1992. Tim Cain had gotten the CD-ROM version and it was the first ebook I read. Then we went back to the first Hugos and tried to read them in order. We had to go on scavenger hunts through used book stores to find some of the titles. I think we finished our book club with The Doomsday Book.

Doing the same here. You can still find most of them used on amazon. Many of them are discards from US libraries. You can usually get them for a couple of bucks.

My biggest surprise was Rogue Moon (Hugo 1961). Incredible ending, up there with Man in the High Castle (Hugo 1963).

I agree with the "fascinating tour" part. The earlier books (from the 50s and 60s) where clearly more optimistic and more realistic at the same time. The human nature was captured more accurately I believe, most of the heros were actually anti-heroes. But the human capabilities were clearly over evaluated and the social interaction a little simplistic. Also, its funny to read books were martians were still a plausible thing (Protector Hugo 1973).

If I have an advice to give you it's: don't limit yourself to the 90s onward. You are missing on gems like Rendez-vous with Rama (Hugo 1974) or Forever War (Hugo 1976).

I really enjoyed the books from the 50's before people really started thinking of computers, plastics, composite materials and so on.

They would be flying around in their spaceships using slide rulers to calculate everything, wearing their fur-lined space suits etc.

"The earlier books (from the 50s and 60s) where clearly more optimistic", I am not that sure, "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (1953) is far from optimistic. It didn't get Hugo at its time, though, but got "retro" Hugo later on (2004).

But maybe you are right, it didn't get Hugo because it was too pessimistic, unfortunately, this one book gets more and more up to date with its predictions...

I have a complete-but-one set of the Gardner Dozois-edited Best New SF for much the same reason. You can pinpoint the exact year everyone realised networks were going to be big, or when turgid Dune-influenced 70s SF got replaced with fast, nimble cyberpunk.

It's strange, you rarely hear it mentioned in the same breath as other post-apocalyptic literature like A Boy and His Dog or I Am Legend. I was only made aware of it while reading an article about the making of Fallout.

So, thanks for the indirect recommendation!

>It's strange, you rarely hear it mentioned in the same breath as other post-apocalyptic literature like A Boy and His Dog or I Am Legend.

Only because I rarely hear either of those mentioned at all, unlike Canticle.

I Am Legend is famous for having kickstarted the modern "zombie" trope, as pioneered in cinema by George Romero. He cited I Am Legend as his major influence; he just changed vampires to... ghouls is it? Romero didn't call them zombies.

I Am Legend has been made into a film at least 3 different times. It’s influenced a lot of people even if they never read the book.

EDIT: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007), 28 Days Later (2002)…

My favorite is 28 Days Later

Given your references I feel bound to offer up:

The Road, McCarthy

And in a different sort of apocalypse:

Nueromancer, Gibson

I believe that Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" was also a major influence behind it.

Absolutely, but we didn't refer to it as much as the other three. But besides Dogmeat, it also influenced the Vaults.

Oh, I didn't notice the "we" there. Thanks for the info!

Can you please make a WebGL version of Supreme Commander? The economy of that game, and the tech tree, were so awesome. I am so sad that the economy was dumbed down for Supreme Commander 2.

Too bad the Aeon got the Black Sun (bad name choice?)... I support Cybran and going autonomous, like what is wrong with Aeon: they are like the Illuminati from scripture but just retarded from Eastasian evil.

That's so funny. I played Fallout many many years before reading A Canticle for Leibowitz and couldn't stop thinking "So much of this FEELS like Fallout".

Since you're here - had you read Dr. Bloodmoney, or A Terran Odyssey, both by Philip K Dick? It very neatly fits the vibe but I've never seen it mentioned as a reference. And it has an idea (a guy who makes fake cigarettes, for people who won't let an apocalypse get in the way of their addiction) that seems so perfectly Fallout that I'm surprised it's not part of it. Or maybe I've forgotten that part.

I have not, but it's been added to my ever growing stack of (e)books. Thanks!

That inspiration wasn't lost in Wasteland 2, where there's a "Isaac Leibovitz" npc who accepts a canticle item : ^ )

I remember reading Canticle and thinking, "this feels just like Fallout" at various parts.

One question, is City of Lost Children the French movie by Jeunet or something else?

Thank you for City of Lost Children. Just ... thank you :)

Thank you for your work. The persona of the desert wanderer helped this shy kid feel a little more confident in high school.

Thank you for playing! Glad we could give you a boost. I'm super appreciative of all the Fallout fans I've met over the years for doing the same to me.

This indeed is a lovely book, one of my very favorites, and one of the most influential science fiction novels written. Maybe only Vonnegut was able to match the combination of grimness and humor.

Walter M Miller Jr was a Catholic, and it helps to see the book through that particular blend of hopeless original sin and joyful redemption. He, and many of his characters, believed in both. It's a sensitive portrayal of people who are deeply religious for principled reasons, yet don't fall into easy caricature.

It's the only novel that he ever wrote. He published a couple dozen short stories, many of which are worth reading. Several are available here -- https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Walter%20M._Miller,%20J...

His notes for a "Canticle" sequel were stitched together after his death into "Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman," but that's not even a patch on the original. Terry Bisson did much of the work, and I'm sure it was hard. Where "Canticle" is humane and sharp and focused, "Wild Horse Woman" is perfunctory and scattered and meandering.

It's been a while but "A Canticle For Leibowitz" is one of my sf favorites and one I revisit every few years.

I don't share the view of this post's author that Miller was saying nuclear holocaust is an inevitable result of the human condition.

Rather, I see Canticle as the Catholic interpretation of the contemporary American cultural belief that fiery nuclear war was coming soon -- the gestalt embodied in, say, Tom Lehrer singing "We Will All Go Together When We Go".

Given that society feels that way, Miller asks -- how did we get there? Where might we go next? And how do we reckon with the concepts of sin and grace in this wholly alien future we seem to have suddenly entered?

> Walter M Miller Jr was a Catholic

On that note, I couldn’t help but read the book as a critique of the Protestant reformation.

Indeed,for basically this reason the book was a large influence in my conversion to Catholicism, viewing it as more able to keep knowledge preserved than the Reformed Protestantism of my upbringing.

Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but... why? What in the book points you to that conclusion?

When I put together a favorite short stories list in SF, I cheated a bit by making "Fiat Homo" (which is the first part of the re-worked novel) one of them. But it's one of the great books.

Most of what you read on the news and social media would have you convinced that civilization is declining or collapsing. If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy).

What does this mean? Why the difference between the measurable state of the world and the doomer discourse? I think its rooted in two things.

The first reason is that both social media and news media are monetized by your attention, and attention is far higher when things are presented as terrible than when things are presented as good. Bad news goes viral far better than good news.

The second reason is that being highly online is correlated with depression. The people who are most likely to be spending their time posting online are more likely to be depressed and lose perspective about the world around them.

What's the solution? I don't know for sure but I think a good first step is to limit the time you spend consuming news media and social media, and instead spend time offline living life. What's the point of a constant stream of information if it leads to inaccurate perceptions of the world?

> two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy

"Notable" is quite the understatement IMHO.

> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy).

Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put off kids because they care about overpopulation), or topsoil availability, or fresh water availability (climate change contributes but we're also using way too much), or garbage in the ocean, or the decimation of life in the ocean (which climate change isn't helping but it's more from overfishing), etc etc etc.

That's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure I can hunt down a lot more.

And it's super dependent on where you live too. Try telling Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, Syrians, Yemenis, Lebanese, etc. if they're better off now than they were in the past.

When I look up many of these bad numbers you mention, they do not seem very bad. Life expectancy is up and to the right (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...), homocide has recently had an uptick but on a longer time scale is good (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...), and the suicide rate is about the same as it was 30-40 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States).

I agree it depend on where you are, but if you look at the globe in its entirety, things look even better than if you restrict your view to the US.

The crime/life expectancy stuff were just things I've been hearing about the most recent few years. They've been mostly on a better trend if you extend the timescale, sure, but the pandemic threw a total monkey wrench into everything, and these things are going the wrong direction again.

Will it stay that way, I don't know, maybe not, but they're not currently getting better, which is counter to the 'everything is doing better except these two things' the parent was suggesting. And I suspect as the other issues (such as the following paragraph) become even worse, all these figures will start doing a lot worse again, as people have to start competing/fighting/possibly going to war, over a smaller and smaller number of resources.

The war in Ukraine really shined a light on that, as food and natural gas availability became a big problem for many countries.

Topsoil and water and animal life and freshwater and other things are doing much, much worse though, and very little is being done to reverse course there (and will take hundreds of generations to fix naturally even if we stop 100% now).

Declining population growth is in all ways a positive. Rising population is a good thing to essentially linearly improve nominal GDP, but does little to improve per capita GDP. Other than that nominal GDP bump I struggle to see any positive associated with population growth. Most people put off having kids because, effectively, people are living much longer and it’s economically easier to have kids older. Effective contraception, sexual education, extended life spans, and a general social acceptance that children aren’t the mark of a successful life are IMO primary contributors to that decline.

I would note in my own life we waited a long time to have a kid because we wanted to be engaged in our careers early on. Once we had a kid we decided to stop simply because we enjoyed the focus on our daughter and didn’t see having a ton of kids as a social imperative. That puts our family at below replacement rate. My experience isn’t particularly unique among the parents I know, and we are actually younger than many.

I know all of the above is anecdotal and conjecture, but I’m fairly confident if I did my normal citation and data collection I would largely be supported (having seen the data and analysis in the past) but I’m sick and have too little energy right now.

I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care, the care becomes more expensive in ways that governments never provisioned for (see Japan and many countries in Western Europe for good examples of this in practice).

In the longer term this depresses GDP per capita as resources have to be diverted from productive industries like high-tech manufacturing into extremely unproductive industries like aged care. Again, Japan and many Western European countries provide good examples of this in practice. Finally, as the reality of the broader economic decline sets in, second order effects start to take hold like brain drain - as young workers see higher wages working in more productive economies, they decide to leave, worsening the population pyramid and depriving the government of precious tax revenue needed to pay for aged care. (Japan and many Western European countries are sadly, again, examples of this phenomenon).

The short term effects you're describing of nominal GDP rising and per capita GDP falling is only true when populations are growing through bad immigration policy, which is what we commonly see in the US for example. Growing population organically and sustainably, or through productive immigration that targets gaps in the country's labor force, should never have that effect as the new member of the population should eventually increase GDP by more than the average existing worker today.

At an individual rather than population level of course, having fewer or no children is easier, which is why people are doing it. But this describes a local optimum only, while the true optimum is population growth.

I think you made an erroneous assumption. Here you say the declining birthdays are always aging populations that require more care and this is a net drag. First, care and health services do contribute to GDP and provide good income work for those providing care. Second, while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate was higher. As that ages out of the population you’re back to an equilibrium. Third, aging population doesn’t mean decrepit population. Part of our aging story in the developed world is that quantity of life has sort of capped out but we are continuously improving the quality of life at all ages through medicine, nutrition, education, etc. Fourth, people are working considerably longer. People used to retire around 50 to 55, then 60-65, now it’s more towards 62-70. I don’t see that trend reversing frankly especially as quality of life care improves which I expect it to dramatically in the next 10 years. I suspect we are also within spitting distances of genetic, mRNA, and other cancer treatments that virtually eliminate the need for radiation and chemo while providing astounding outcomes as close to “cured” as you can get with cancer. Fifth, you bring up Japan as well one should - but if you look at Japan they’re doing fine by any standard and their per capita GDP is about the same as it was in 1990 in adjusted currency. It’s not like we’ve never seen youth / aging boom and busts in history and everything is fine.

As a final point I think older workers are generally more productive as long as they’re able to use the tools they’ve developed skill with. With the advent of computers and information technology older generations were unable to map their skills to the new way of work. Society existed in the state they were used to for 10,000 years and suddenly instead of being masters as the elder had been, they were bumbling fools - made more tragic in that they were otherwise highly skilled at what they did with a lifetime of experience. This colors our perception of the aged because we are still in the middle of that transition. But do you think you and I will be limited by ability to use information technology? Mental decline doesn’t generally start until much later in life, and people are doing careers into their 70’s with success.

>while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate was higher. As that ages out of the population you’re back to an equilibrium.

This is absolutely wrong. The "aging population" will be larger than the "younger population" in any situation in which there is sub-replacement fertility + stable (or increasing, obviously) life expectancy. It's just that the ratio may stabilize but it will be <1.

I think you're thinking about 'old professionals' when whats under discussion is "jesus fuck you are old as dirt" people, and how the economics change when your distribution starts skewing towards that old and ineffective side.

> while the true optimum is population growth.

Right up until you overshoot your ecological carrying capacity and the whole society collapses, of course. That part tends to be less optimal.

The US is only 5% of the population. On a global scale all of those factors are improving.

Just as the Gibson quote went: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed"

No, they're not all improving.

Topsoil exhaustion and poisoning is global. Freshwater scarcity is much worse in China and the Subcontinent than in the USA. Antibiotic resistance is world-wide. Destruction of rainforests: likewise. Female literacy is declining in developing countries, despite more time spent in "school".

That suggests Rest of World will soon experience the decline the US, UK and some other Western countries are experiencing.

Or that the USA will eventually catch up with the more advanced nations. Actually even if everybody regressed to the mean it would be a step up for the States.

The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to keep the middle class workers content, optimistic and most importantly, compacent. 'Don't look up' style.

All these arguments explicitly ignore the many elephants in the room, like the global fucking pandemic we've been mishandling for the past two years or the climate disaster which is already making itself felt by westerners.

The outcome is actually pretty grim if you read between the lines. You don't have to monitor the news or social media to figure out that we're not in the best place right now when it comes to a lot of global metrics. We can pick and chose a couple and make ourselves feel good and go about our business being productive little bees in the capitalist machine, but we're just fooling ourselves.

My personal assessment is that the effects of climate change will zero out a lot of those measures for which we're doing better than our forefathers.

> The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness

Hans Rosling is right.

And the success of the world does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it. It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart.

Max Roser said it well with "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better."

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

> the success of the world

Which part of the world is succeeding? What does that actually mean? 'Success of the world' is such an empty statement. What did it succeed at? Destroying our habitat?

> does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it

Most of the more brilliant minds in the current industrialized world are working on making more money for someone (themselves or others). Who's working on actually improving it? And improve it how? By making the world a better place 'through minimal message oriented transport layers'?

> It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart

Nobody is saying one should be a doomer or whatever. Doomer implies losing all hope. What I'm advocating is losing hope for the current system, not for the world.

If Rosling is right why are NASA scientists gluing themselves to oil company offices to make a point about climate catastrophe?

We're about to learn that you can't spreadsheet and infographic your way out of a collapsing ecosystem.

And we're going to do it the hard and stupid way, because the intelligent way required changes starting 30 or 40 years ago.

While I don’t disagree with the negatives here unless you’ve experienced extreme poverty saying it’s “capitalist koolaid” sounds frankly a little naive. These are billions of people who aren’t struggling to do basic things like drink water and eat, shelter themselves and their family, etc, not just at a personal level but at a national level. The change in the world from nearly everyone in that state to today where almost everyone isn’t is a success.

But it might also be our doom.

I guess we shall see. I wager we will make it though.

How much of 'we', do you reckon?

If you just mean "some much smaller number of humans might survive this", then I think there's a decent chance you're right. And I suspect that number will end up being 100 million or less. I still think our current trajectory is more likely on track for 0 (or damn near it), though.

There's no way in hell the earth is going to maintain 8 billion+ people on the planet indefinitely. There's going to be a major, major drop at some point, probably spurred by war over declining resources, and it's probably going to take a good chunk of civilization down with it. We might be several decades away from that (or perhaps not, there's some disturbing signs out there), but there's just no way that "number goes up always" on a finite planet.

Most measures we typically see are economic measures. They are indeed going up: fewer people life in poverty, and all dependent variables like lifespan and education improve too.

However, economic growth is currently tied to exploiting finite resources with ever increasing speed. Consequently, all measures that look at natural resources give rise to increasing existential angst: The oceans are empty, biodiversity is crashing; the climate is messed up, likely beyond the point where we can prevent catastrophic warming; topsoil is eroding at an amazing rate, aquifers are depleting; plastics, and other "forever chemicals" keep accumulating with as of yet mostly unknown effects.

So while the economy keeps growing, it looks like we're just increasing the speed at which we'll hit the wall.

Equilibrium is hard to maintain in complex adaptive systems. Butterfly effect, chaos theory, Gaia Hypothesis, and all that.

Our awareness of the potential for collapse is absolutely crucial. We have agency. We can nudge our systems. Postpone catastrophic outcomes for another day.

Humanity will always be kicking the can down the road. There is no stable state.

I don't know what to do or say about fatigue, burnout, and apathy due to chronic doomsaying. For my part, I've pulled back. No corporate media. No politics with friends and family. Started journalling. Prioritized my life and try to stick to the plan. Sometimes successfully.

That was true in 2010. In 2020 things are getting worse.

Is it a blip? Maybe. But the first measured decline in life expectancy was measured in 2015, and there have been declines in half the years since then.

> democracy vs autocracy

Is this really true? Some democracies are under pressure (USA for example), but for example easter europe wasn't a democracy not so long ago. I don't really know what's going on in Africa. How many democracies are developing there vs backsliding?

This video on the deaths in WWII will put things into perspective.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU

Easily one of my favourite novels. It's riddled with beauty; there is a lens held up to the shepherding of knowledge that made me really appreciate what it means to be a scholar.

It's a wild ride and I think a book people should read.

My fav quote,

"When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.”

Definitely one of my favorites, too. There's an elegiac quality to it that I haven't quite seen in any other novel.

I have a number of quotations jotted down from it, but since this a tech site I'll restrict myself to sharing this one that I sometimes think of when dealing with a recalcitrant machine or mysterious bug:

        "That contraption--listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't
    believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying
    soul. Can the principle of a 'thinking machine'--man-made--be a rational
    soul? Blah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know
    what?"
        "Father?"
        "Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think!
    It knows good and evil I tell you, and it chose the later."

Elegiac is the perfect word for it!

It's a lovely quote too. I remember reading the novel and thinking, 'Holy shit, he's hit the nail on the head!'

I'd happily run a class on it. Whenever anyone asks for a reading list, it's often on there.

I take the novel as a mystic work, much like Meister Eckhart's works. It's a pendulum swing between the secular and the sacred.

"Sell it to an atheist! No that wouldn't be kind. Sell it for scrap!"

I would like to read the book and I’m sure it’s good. But whenever a character says “does it not?” I want to soak the book in gasoline and light it on fire.

The 'does it not?' breaks the flow of the quote perfectly. It was intentional, I like to believe; it's as if your peace of a flowing sentence is suddenly interupted by the life of a fantastic writer! :D

Why?

That is such an arbitrary phrase to have such a visceral reaction to.

There’s no shortage of sci-fi books with incredible creativity about what could come about in the future…and little care placed in creating realistic dialogue or character development.

I get where the OP is coming from. If you’re coming from the modern world of well-rounded fantasy sci-fi storytellers of Sanderson and Rothfuss, then reading stories of the past can be very frustrating.

But we didn’t blow ourselves back to the stone age in the 50s and 60s. This fate turned out to be not quite as inevitable as “A Canticle” would seem to suggest.

Yet evidence pointing to this outcome was all around us during the Cold War, right up to the late 1980s. Development of new and more potent weapons. Serious accidents or near accidents - one crazy one I remember hearing about was one side almost launching a retaliatory barrage when the radar gave a false positive for an incoming attack. Proxy wars. Opaque succession plans in the USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Sabre-rattling and standoffs all over the world.

In elementary school in the 1970s we didn't have to do "Duck and Cover" but we did have drills involving classes marching in a line down to the basement which had signs marking it as a "Fallout Shelter." Sometimes I still see them. (History: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/01/23/local-news/what-do-thos...)

When I got a little older, I can't tell you how unsettling it was to see serious looking people talking on the nightly news about some incident on the North Korean border, or a power struggle in Moscow after Brezhnev died, or how many thousands of ICBMs each side had pointing at each other. How fucked up is it that 15 year old me understood concepts like MIRV (https://armscontrolcenter.org/multiple-independently-targeta...) or the U.S. maintaining a bunch of B-52s loaded with nukes in the air at all times?

The news we saw and read was reinforced through pop culture that drove home the idea that we would blow ourselves to bits. In high school in the mid-1980s we were assigned Canticle as well as Neville Shute's On The Beach, which follows a similarly depressing narrative (northern hemisphere covered by radiation, southern slowly dying off, what people do as the inevitable gets closer). Red Dawn. Firefox. Reruns of Dr. Strangelove. Or the TV series The Day After.

We couldn't believe it when crowds climbed on the Berlin Wall in November 1989. That's when people were able to rub their eyes and think just maybe we weren't going to kill ourselves.

In 1983, I was watching TV after my parents had gone off to bed. The Emergency Warning System came on, and I said "Hey, it's the Emergency Warning System!" I have never seen my father move that fast. That's the best measure I have of how deep the fear of nuclear war was.

(It turned out to be a dam failure caused by flooding, and they were trying to warn everyone downstream to get out now. Nothing to do with nuclear war.)

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

Crazy times. 1960 - 1968 The United States flew nuclear armed bombers to the borders of the USSR 24 hours a day.

Imagine if 'insert country name' flew armed bombers to the border of 'insert western country name' every day in 2022.

Not to get you nervous, but the Russians run bombers to the airspace of Alaska all the time.

US jets intercept and turn them around.

It's the expensive version of the border crossings between India & Pakistan

Don't they do this more like yearly? And they don't usually breach airspace generally considered sovereign, though they might fly into airspace the target country itself believes sovereign. AFAIU, these flights are similar to the yearly runs the U.S. Navy makes through some disputed territorial waters; that is, principally intended to preserve normative freedom of movement rights, albeit in a military context obviously serving strategic security interests.

Here's a typical news report which appears approximately yearly: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2020/10/20...

To wit,

> F-22 Raptors from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, intercepted a group of Russian aircraft in international airspace near Alaska Monday night.

> In a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, NORAD said the Raptors intercepted a pair of Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers escorted by Su-35 fighters. NORAD said it also identified a Russian A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft supporting the other Russian planes that “loitered” in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone and came within 30 nautical miles of Alaska’s shore.

> NORAD said that all Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and at no time entered U.S. or Canadian airspace.

Another example, from 2015: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/09/politics/russian-bombers-u-s-...

> The U.S. military performed two intercepts of Russians aircraft, though they never entered U.S. airspace, according to a U.S. military official.

> In Alaska, F-22s took off to identify and track two TU-95 Bear bombers near the Southern coast. The two bombers were followed until they turned around.

> [...]

> Similarly off the coast of California, F-15s tracked two other TU-95s that had been detected near the coast of San Francisco. The incident in California was a rarity, because Russian forces don’t generally travel that far South. However, this was reminiscent of a similar flight Russia performed off the West coast on July 4 three years prior.

If anything, their frequency is less than yearly, at least off the U.S. coast, especially before 2015 (and within the range of internet memory). They seem far more common (and aggressive) in Europe, which I expected. And I can't find one example where the Russian aircraft breached U.S. territorial airspace. Sincere question: can you provide examples?

EDIT: Here's a 2008 story addressing Sarah Palin's claims about "incursions": https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/after-palins-inter...

> The air-defense identification zone, almost completely over water, extends 12 miles past the perimeter of the United States. Most nations have similar areas.

> However, no Russian military planes have been flying into that zone, said Maj. Allen Herritage, a spokesman for the Alaska region of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage.

> “To be very clear, there has not been any incursion in U.S. airspace in recent years,” Herritage said.

> What Palin might have been referring to was a buffer zone of airspace that extends beyond the 12-mile strip. Although not recognized internationally as the United States’ to protect, the military watches it.

> That zone is where there has been increased Russian bomber exercises, about 20 in the past two years. When Russian bombers enter that expanded area, sometimes called the outer air-defense identification zone by the military, U.S. or Canadian fighter jets are dispatched to check them, Herritage said.

There seem to be a few issues.

1) "The United States flew nuclear armed bombers to the borders of the USSR 24 hours a day."

That is true. One of the linked-to examples is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Giant_Lance "These bombers were to patrol the Northern polar ice caps to survey the frozen terrain, whilst armed with nuclear weaponry.[4][6][2] The patrols consisted of eighteen-hour long vigils, which were executed with the intention of appearing as suspicious movements from the US."

2) Do Russian planes military fly close to the US on a more than yearly occurrence?

Yes. That is without a doubt, as you have show.

3) Do US planes do the same?

Yes. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2014/09... mentions "China denied any reckless flying and said it would continue responding to U.S. surveillance flights off its coast, which Beijing believes are a threat to its security." and famously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

For Russia, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-says-fighter-intercepted-u-s-... "Russia says a fighter jet intercepted two U.S. military surveillance planes in the Black Sea" and of course there are currently a lot of NATO surveillance flights watching the Russian border now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_EP-3#Other_incidents lists two close passes of a US EP-3 by a Russian Su-27, and one by a Venezuelan Su-30.

4) Are any of these to preserve "normative freedom of movement rights"?

No.

5) Do any of them "usually breach airspace generally considered sovereign"?

No.

The original claims were:

> 1) the Russians run bombers to the airspace of Alaska all the time. 2) US jets intercept and turn them around. 3) It's the expensive version of the border crossings between India & Pakistan

If we're charitable, then in isolation #1 is reasonable. But not so much in the context of #2 and #3. Note that actual cross-border incursions are very common between India & Pakistan. As well as between India and China, for that matter, and a host of other country pairings. Moreover, the phrasing "turn them around" reflects connotations similar to phrasing like "escort", commonly used in popular news reports. But nobody is actually escorting here; that's propaganda. U.S. fighters aren't "escorting" Russian bombers any more than the Chinese "escort" U.S. SIGINT flights or naval water transits; the planes and ships continue on their same, planned courses--excepting occasional aggressive maneuvers were the Chinese behave like their going to ram a plane or ship.

AFAICT, no territorial violations are happening here, which IMO is what was implied. Moreover, especially during the Cold War, the U.S. had a long and sorted history of actual incursions into Russian and Soviet airspace; incursions far more numerous and serious than what the U.S. experienced.

I took umbrage with the claims because, while I believe as a general matter Russia is a far more prolific violator of international norms, including territorial incursions, when it comes to their dealings with the U.S. in this regard they've actually been sticklers for obeying boundaries, notwithstanding characterizations to the contrary. And at least since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has likewise been rather good about that as well. And these characterizations matter because they're at the center of Russian accusations regarding how the U.S. and NATO has treated Russian security interests.

Regarding this specific point:

> > 4) Are any of these to preserve "normative freedom of movement rights"?

> No.

I disagree. When Russia sends bombers toward the U.S., they're generally going to deliberately penetrate the "buffer zone", just like U.S. ships and planes will deliberately penetrate China's self-defined buffer zones. To do otherwise would be to risk legitimizing claims about the nature of those buffer zones. In other words, part of the exercise is to maintain the normalcy of the internationally recognized, more circumscribed sovereign claims.

I do concede that these flights by Russia happen far more often than once a year. I've been following foreign affairs for over 20 years and have known about these practices, but clearly judging their frequency by the frequency of reporting is especially error prone.

You're right. The examples I mention are not like the border crossings between India & Pakistan.

> they're generally going to deliberately penetrate the "buffer zone",

Yes. My comment concerned your earlier use of principally in "principally intended to preserve normative freedom of movement rights."

I believe they are principally done as surveillance flights, with freedom of movement rights as an important but secondary role.

Otherwise you could use something cheaper than a fully-crewed EP-3.

Besides planes, see "Soviet fishing trawlers" (" After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized a counter AGI program for United States destroyers to come alongside the AGIs to push against them, foul their screws with steel nets, and focus high power electromagnetic transmitters to burn out the amplifying circuitry of their electronic sensors." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_ship ).

Now that you two have finished, recall that per HN we are intended to grant the best interpretation of a statement and not the worst.

My comment stands and the misinterpretation has at least born fruit.

The 'border crossings' i mentioned might have been better referred to as 'border stations', where rehearsed performance occurs daily between guards. Not referencing physical incursions into disputed territories to maintain claim.

Then no, it's not like an "expensive version of the border crossings between India & Pakistan."

For one, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/04/politics/us-f-22-intercep... comments that it could be a "routine" training exercise. ("a senior defense official stressed, last month, that they are "not a concern" and attributed the uptick to a recent lack of available Russian aircraft and need to boost training.")

While the example you give is not.

What?

Reread my comment.

'Not a concern' is certainly what I would consider high kick marching competitions between guardstations

You thought badcppdev might be nervous about the modern equivalent of high kick marching competitions?

After badcppdev pointed out the US historically flew nuclear armed bombers to the borders of the USSR 24 hours a day? Including with the deliberate goal of escalating the nuclear threat to the Soviet Union, in order to improve America' position at the negotiating table?

Your statement "US jets intercept and turn them around" is incorrect - these flights are not turned around.

"High kick marching competitions" are not training exercises. Nor are they surveillance operations.

That's not even remotely the same as flying multiple bomber missions every single day.

Imagine every time you tuck your children into bed you know that there are nuclear weapons heading towards your home. Hopefully tonight they turn away at the border again.

IIRC it was going on even longer than that, although perhaps on a reduced frequency. My barber worked at an air base in North Dakota late in the Cold War and mentioned something about that.

I would suggest reading some history books to round out stories like that.

" Maybe being happy with the current state of things is just hard. Maybe actually maintaining a good, stable society is hard too; harder than expecting what worked yesterday to work for us now. I don’t want to minimize or ignore that there are very real problems with the current state of things, and trying to improve them is a good idea, but current political appetites feel decidedly destructive."

Agreed. Things aren't actually all that bad right now. When compared to most of history things are really pretty damn good. Sure there's the pandemic, but as pandemics go... well, there have been much worse. And yet a lot of people want to see it all burn. I really don't understand this sentiment. What makes them think that something better will arise out of the ashes?

If you ever find yourself genuinely unable to understand the views of large groups of people, that's usually a good sign to take a step back and try to approach the subject more dispassionately. People are usually pretty rational on close inspection. They just operate under different premises and experiences.

This article is pretty typical of the genre "unhappy leftists ask why people inexplicably reject their utopia". As per usual no real political analysis is provided, just the cleverly worded implication that people who disagree with the preferred direction don't really have political views, just atavistic destructive tendencies. That they want to "watch it all burn". It's flattering to the ego to believe that other people are just vastly intellectually inferior, of course, but not very intellectually interesting for observers.

To wit, the core of the author's thesis is that with the threat of nuclear war receding, "Capitalism and liberal democracy had won, and nothing would ever really challenge this staus quo again. That thesis has now unraveled so obviously that nobody claims we are at the “end of history” anymore, and this book is remarkable only for the hubris it embodied. Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden."

This sounds clever but is devoid of any meaning or detail. It's a New York Times cliché, not actual analysis of the world you could learn anything from. And because it's so thin we can easily spin it around.

Consider Trump. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is about a world post-nuclear apocalypse. Trump is cast as somehow equivalent or similar to this. But let us recall the alternative voters were given! I remember the original presidential debates, and it was Trump's opponent who wanted to create a no-fly zone over Syria i.e. start a hot war with the nuclear armed Russians! And it was Trump who stood against that and said no way, we're not doing that, we're not starting a hot war with Russia over Syria. So you could argue that the voters stood up for Eden in that moment by saying: no, getting the first woman president is not enough to offset the risk of nuclear war. A serious analysis that linked A Canticle with modern political events should really consider that sort of thing, but this article isn't such an analysis. It's instead the usual cry of pain of those committed to unaccountable managerial technocratism, wondering why the savages inexplicably reject their benevolent rule.

If as you say, that Trump did not want to confront Russia in order to prevent nuclear war (I don't think that was his motivation, but let's roll with your argument for a sec) then Trump was an appeaser in the mold of Neville Chamberlain.

As for his actual motivations, I think it had a lot more to do with wanting to make money in Russia as well as his admiration of autocrats.

> People are usually pretty rational on close inspection.

Large groups of people can be agitated and manipulated into being very irrational. Plenty of examples from history.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/25/donald-trump...

"Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton’s plan for Syria would “lead to world war three” because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia."

I really enjoyed the book. I’m almost always down for some sci-fi dystopia, and as a religious person I enjoyed this particular lens on it.

A couple I highly recommend from another Catholic author, The Lord of the World, and Dawn of All, by Robert Hugh Benson.

Those two are more early 20th century Catholicism in worldview, which I particularly enjoyed.

Not quite a dystopia, but of you (like me) also loved those books, then a highly recommend CS Lewis' Space Trilogy. One of my favourite series of all time, especially the last one.

Those are good, but kind of strange and hard to get through, especially the first one.

worth it for book 3 though

I’ll have to go back! I remember loving that series as a kid. Thanks!

You ever read 'Too Like the Lightning'? Its really good. One of the things going on through the series is basically "what if a bunch of atheists found compelling yet questionable evidence of a miracle".

I haven’t! I’ll give it a try.

I could not get into Lord of the World although I really enjoyed another novel of Benson's.

> The Lord of the World, and Dawn of All, by Robert Hugh Benson

Great tip, I'm going to order these now.

My vote for best quote from the book

“Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. ‘You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'”

“Never tell a child you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body. As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.” George Macdonald 1892 ("Friends" here is a reference to Quakers)

via https://books.google.com/books?id=vDMrAAAAYAAJ&dq=george+mac...

h/t https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-have-a-soul-cs-lewis-neve...

It is so realistic too. I know a Prior (similar to an Abbot) who speaks exactly like this at times.

An excellent 1981 radio production of 'Canticle' is still online.

[https://archive.org/details/NPRPresentsACANTICLEFORLIEBOWITZ...]

Indeed, excellent! Listening to it now. Perhaps the best dramatization of any novel I’ve ever heard. Thank you for the recommendation!

I read this book when I was a teenager simply because the title sounded cool. I was in for a real surprise - it blew me away. Memories. I don’t get that feeling often when reading any more - maybe age, maybe rarity of the books quality.

I read this via this SF Masterworks series and I've enjoyed most that I've picked up:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks

Richard Mathesson books are good, I think I am Legend is the one I read first and then started looking out for others in this series.

Swastika Night was probably the most mind-blowing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_Night

I very much enjoyed ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ when I read it, but in looking back while it was tremendous for middle school me, it doesn’t hold up. The whole “Fall of Rome/Dark Ages/Western Monasticism preserves civilization” narrative just isn’t true and is a misreading of Western history. That’s a post-hoc framing created in the late Renaissance/early modern era.

Interesting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?

Well it was a kind of hand wavy pronouncement on my part.

With respect to the ‘Fall of Rome/Dark Ages’ narrative I had Pico della Mirandola and Edward Gibbon in mind.

Considering their takes on monasticism, I suppose monasticism as the savior of civilization was actually a much later add on.

> a much later add on.

Yeah that's what I was thinking too. I'm going to re-read Canticle soon-ish but I wonder to what extent Miller endorses even the latter. I feel like his concerns were much more immediately spiritual than cultural. I'm thinking particularly of the scene where the main character of whichever volume meets the Pope up-close and is taken aback to see that his garments are moth-eaten and threadbare.

I think it's simply that when things are bad, It's easy to know what to, what the immediate goal should be, easy to agree what's wrong and what would be better.

When things are not so bad, it's not as clear what is still wrong and what would be progress, and everyone disagrees and those disagreements become the new worst thing.

I tried reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz” recently.

Didn't love it. Not alot really happened in it.

It felt like a response/commentary to the sort of apocalypse that was envisaged in the 1980's, like nuclear war. I feel like there's a much more sophisticated post apocalyptic vision of the future now.

As an alternative, I loved "The Road" - now there's a really great post apocalyptic scifi.

The book is about faith, the apocalypse is what is testing it.

I really didn't like The Road. Felt like bleakness for bleakness' sake, a kind of "pessimism porn". Maybe I just didn't understand it.

> I really didn't like The Road. Felt like bleakness for bleakness' sake, a kind of "pessimism porn". Maybe I just didn't understand it.

I the book Capitalist Realism recently, and it had an interesting section that observed modern society tends to confuse bleakness and depravity with "being realistic."

A wonderful book, one of my favourites. This intersection of science, religion, dystopia, raw humanity - it makes for an enthralling reading experience.

> If the failure by “A Canticle for Leibowitz” to predict the nuclear holocaust tells us anything, it’s that this is indeed possible.

The nuclear holocaust wasn't really a prediction of that book; it was a premise.

Yeah I think Miller was using the nuclear holocaust as a vehicle to reflect on original sin (i.e., the inevitable tendency of human beings to engage in self-destructive behavior) and the antidote to it offered by the Catholic Church. If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.

> If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.

Maybe last year, but we're back to nuclear sabre-rattling and great-power conflict now.

It's a poorly constructed sentence (and unfortunately the last, intended to inspire hope).

The book itself is the prediction.

> The book itself is the prediction.

The book itself is literature. To see it as a prediction and especially as a failed prediction seems simpleminded (in the techie-futurist way).

(A) I don't see it as a failed prediction, that's the author's view. Me, I think history is a long time compared to the time we've lived with WMD.

(B) The type of literature in question is called an allegory. To see an allegory as a prediction is... aligned with why people write them. I wouldn't call picking the wrong definition to support an argument simpleminded; perhaps friction-seeking would be a good term.

Read this book for the first time a couple years ago (before COVID). My memory of it is admittedly hazy, but I recall it putting me in a pretty gloomy place, emotionally.

The premise of the book is that technological progress coupled with original sin means humanity is doomed to endlessly repeat genocide against itself and the Earth.

In other words, we have this hardware-level bug that bubbles to the surface every couple of generations, and the undercurrent of technological progress means that each time it pops there's more technology to put to work against the "other" (also known as "the self", in a broader context).

It's hard to look at these ingredients and not agree that the extrapolated recipe is as likely as it is disturbing.

I disagree with the author of this post, in that "kicking" is a very rational response for many people, especially today. The comfort of the author's Eden is paid for by the regrettable suffering of so many people; and they have very few political avenues express it through. Those people are entitled to kick. Wealth and comfort ought to be distributed at a higher pace that isn't so dependent on GDP growth.

I'm optimistic, I think there's enough wealth in the world to solve these problems. But the stickiness of greed around wealth means it'll take some kicking to get us there.

A book recommendation for anyone who enjoyed Canticle: ‘Radio Life’ by Derek Miller

Why is your name green @fromwilliam?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

“Green indicates a new account.”

People keep complaining about "The End of History" but never for good reasons. It predicted president Trump as the sort of "megalothymia" that that might come to power in the end of history! It's just about the lack of alternative credible opposing ideologies. I still found it an incredibly disappointing book but not for any of the reasons that everybody dumps on it for.

i don't get this perspective

> Brexit, Trump, and the social and economic decline, perceived or real, that led to them are the most obvious events that signaled our latest attempts to kick apart Eden.

like okay, those legit aren't great, but don't we face substantially bigger threats from, oh, IDK, Putin's Russia and what may yet be an ascendant China?? Maybe the way we approach these matters, as if sleepwalking, has as much to do with destruction we suffer as any overt impulses towards destruction.

(Also, the people kicking Eden apart usually aren't the most-comfortable ones, but the resentful ones a few rungs down.)

Fukayama's perspective is a very Hegelian one. Some countries might be threatened by wars with other countries but he contends the dominant paradigm of liberal democratic capitalism doesn't have any real contenders against it and so capital H History in that sense is over. Countries might not all embrace this framework but unless large numbers of people come to embrace Putanism or Xi Jinping thought then it isn't proving anything that Fukiyama wrong.

Now, I think that this is a terrible perspective to have so I didn't like the book at all. And I have other beefs with it. But the book was never claiming that countries wouldn't invade each other or that there wouldn't be terrorist attacks or that significant events like that wouldn't continue to happen.

exactly

mRNA

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