Hernando

Superb!. TMoD is a very unique/different book. It’s a neat SF with a lot of philosophy or the other way around. It’s also full of sort-of-poetic lines, i.e :

“As was my habit, I followed the afternoon to the ocean and ended up lounging on a shore of corroded boulders. The waters golden, the horizon blood. The squawking of mindless seagulls. Alone, leering at passersby, I grinned as Saturn brightened and watched feral waves swallow the fireball, savoring the taste.”

“Come midnight, a turquoise aurora hung over the land. Not as a fragile drape gliding down against the stars, but as a slow whip to bleed the firmament of its mysteries. A though out of those celestial wounds she would divine the whereabouts of the men she hunted.”

Some other lines are more straightforward:

“Even though we have more time, it’s the wrong kind of time. Everything moves so fast, and there’s barely a moment to stop and think and-“ “And people don’t understand each other at all, and we have wider but more superficial knowledge, and good ideas get lost in the noise”.

“We had lived in a present built on tomorrows. Wasted tomorrows.”

And some times like:

“-Do you think we have free will?. -I think about it. I don’t think about thinking about it.”

But the philosophical stuff is more dense and harder in one of the narratives, specially when the character is deep-thinking.

The thing is, you can still enjoy the book even if you don’t care about the philosophical and the different prose and just following the plot but it is certainty a better experience reading the “book-in-itself”. It was so good that I was tempted to reread it right away after finishing it.

I would give it a 4.6 rate and I understand why it is still considered a masterpiece.
The book is quite a slog, very so, but is so unique in itself.

Aside, the way Miller found death and looking at this book and see how he wrote the discussion about euthanasia is indeed staggering. Depression is quite a thing.

The following are probably one of the best lines I've ever read in a SF book:

“
We are the centuries.

We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers, and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.

We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd.

Hut two threep foa!
Left!
Left! He-had-a-good-wife-but-he
Left!
Left!
Left!
Right!
Left!

Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben fällt.

We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.

We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do– Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris,

telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve
and a traveling salesman called Lucifer.

We bury your dead and their reputations.
We bury you. We are the centuries.

Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon's slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:

(Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)

Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens– and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn't the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH!–an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)

Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name:

V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Kyrie eleison.
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Christe eleison.
V: Lucifer is fallen.
R: Kyrie eleison, eleison imas!
”