A Canticle for Leibowitz

Hugo Award 1961.

After the Fallout, when the Atomic Rain had stopped, the plagues and madness began. And after that came the simplification when the people – those who were left – turned against the rulers, the teachers, the scientists who had turned the world into a barren desert. All knowledge was destroyed, all the learned were killed – only Leibowitz managed to save some of the books...

And the monks of the order of Leibowitz inherited the sacred relics – spent their lives copying, engraving, interpreting the holy fragments, slowly fashioning a new Renaissance in a barbarous and fallen world...