This is the first Hugo Winner from the 1950s that I've read that doesn't clearly read like a sci fi book from the 1950s. The dialog, plot, everything still holds up extremely well today. The themes of innocence, cyclical nature of history, man's hubris, and more all are still as relevant today as when Miller wrote them nearly 70 years ago. Thoroughly enjoyed this one more than I thought I would. I'm finding that I enjoy science fiction centered around organized religion a lot more than I would have expected. ( )

This was a powerful, yet hard story. Ratings Cannot do justice. This book makes you think & feel, though perhaps not what You want to think or feel. It's an important book. ( )

I had heard that this book was utterly depressing and that's why I wanted to read it. In fact, it's not that depressing at all.
The story is basically about the survival of knowledge and the benefits and dangers that entails, postulating a cyclical view of history in which we attain knowledge we are not capable of bearing and which causes our destruction, only to start all over again due to the (misguided, maybe?) attempts to protect that knowledge by a handful of priests.
After reading this, I get where a lot of similar stories have come from over the years (the first thing that comes to mind is the Babylon 5 epilogue episode where they show us snippets of the far future and it turns out the Earth has been blown back to the Dark Ages and only the priests helped the knowledge survive, until a long time later they reclaim their place in the stars). Its religious allegories are pretty clear: the apple of knowledge and all of that imagery.
But what surprised me was that it wasn't entirely depressing. Maybe that would have been true at the time it was written and some people still read it that way. Some people die in the book, and that's ok. But to me, it's a story about hope, about how no matter how much we screw up, we'll eventually rise again and aim to the stars, even if it's a terrible journey there.
That's how I read it, at least. I prefer that reading over the sense that we're just doomed to repeat our mistakes. Maybe we are. But at some point, culture and technology (which are so intertwined most people don't realize the cognitive rearranging the technology performs on us) will evolve so our consciousness goes beyond the self-destructive passions. Maybe then we'll reach for the stars. ( )

The writing was a little off at times, but the narrative was inventive and carried interesting themes with it ( )

One of my favorite sci-fi books. An apocalyptic story about a monk. I've read it a couple of times. ( )