Flame Deluge

In Flame Deluge Andrew Ravensdale shows how Walter Miller in his 1959 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz – written at the height of the Cold War - uses the Christian notion of Original Sin to make sense of very real fears about the possibility of a nuclear Holocaust. He also shows that the alternative reality that Miller creates is based very firmly on the intellectual history of Western Europe from the Fall of Rome to the thirteenth-century Renaissance and the Reformation. Ravensdale points out that A Canticle for Leibowitz is a prophetic book. Miller is convinced the Holocaust will come. Miller uses the legend of the Wandering Jew to suggest there is no hope of salvation for humanity.
In his prize-winning story The Darfsteller Miller predicted he would write A Canticle for Leibowitz and then quit science fiction.
Ravensdale believes that A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the most powerful books of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller’s pessimistic vision, though perhaps not literally, remains true in our times.