A chief inspiration for my new post-apocalyptic short story, “The Bureau of Myths,” is Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But I am particularly indebted to Walker Percy’s essay on Miller’s novel, “Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz.” In the essay Percy tries to put his finger on why exactly Miller’s novel gave him “agreeable-eerie neck pricklings,” and he attributes it to the fact that Miller’s tale, unlike all other sci-fi fiction, plots both an x and a y axis. What does Percy mean?
Typically, sci-fi fiction plots along a single x coordinate, the time line. “When a starship lands on a strange planet and intelligent beings are encountered, one’s questions have to do with the other’s location on the time line. Have you split the atom yet? Can you dematerialize? What is the stage of evolution of your political system?”
But what makes A Canticle for Leibowitz so special, argues Percy, is that the time line, the x coordinate, is crossed by a y coordinate. “What is the y axis? It is Something That Happened or Something That Will Happen on the time line of such a nature that all points on the time line are read with reference to the happening, as before or after, minus or plus.”
The y coordinate of Canticle is what Percy calls the Jewish or Jewish-Christian coordinate. It is the imposition of something beyond time into the world of time. To apply Jewish-Christian coordinates is a contradiction in terms, says Percy. “It is like turning on a TV soap opera and finding that the chief character is Abraham.”
“The Bureau of Myths” is available on Amazon for just .99 cents.
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