This Old Science Fiction Novel Was a Huge Inspiration for Fallout

After humanity almost nukes itself into oblivion, how would humanity scrape itself back together? The Fallout series and A Canticle for Leibowitz both ask that fascinating question.

Written by Zanadood (@mrzanadood)

With the successful launch of the Fallout TV show, the franchise is once again thrust into cultural significance, but many people may ask the question — Where did these ideas come from? The answer is not simple, and it is one I have considered since I played Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game as a child.

As I grew up with the entries of this series, I kept wondering about the various inspirations of the series and where the writers got the ideas for post-apocalyptic society. This changed when a friend introduced me to an old science fiction novel called A Canticle for Leibowitz. This book was not the easiest read for me, but it was incredibly insightful, and I quickly became enamored with drawing similarities between this novel and my favorite video games. 

What Is A Canticle for Leibowitz?

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a profound science fiction novel published in 1960 by Walter M Miller Jr, which explores what humanity would be like after a near world-ending nuclear event. It is an incredibly granular look into a dystopian future of the post-apocalyptic world and how its surviving generations would interpret their new circumstances. There is no telling just how many works of science fiction may have drawn inspiration from Canticle. 

As I read his book, I was struck by how similar it was to the Fallout games, specifically to the faction known as The Brotherhood of Steel. Miller was revolutionary in the sense that he was creating a world around a world-shattering nuclear event, a topic of inspiration that had only been around for two decades. A post-nuclear wasteland is a scenario many people may be familiar with due to the many forms of media produced in that setting. Still, Canticle stands as one of the earliest and most inspirational.

I believe that Miller's work influenced an incredibly popular video game franchise for the better and considered meaningful details of its worldbuilding in the pursuits of its games.

Introducing The Fallout Series

Fallout is a game franchise created by Tim Cain during his employment at Interplay, where he and a team of developers created Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. The games were released in the late 90s and were successful but slightly outpaced by the other domineering PC titles like Diablo and Baldur’s Gate. Branded as Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, the game became a cult hit due to its dark humor and bizarre narrative of life and survival after a world-ending nuclear event.

The series was later picked up and iterated on when the rights were sold to Bethesda Softworks, starting the age of wildly successful 3D Fallout games we know today. 

War Never Changes: Comparing Canticle and Fallout

Fallout and Canticle are stories of how civilization forms and grows after these catastrophic nuclear events. Both stories center on a world that is relearning its mastery of technology and has managed to preserve it after the dissolution of the internet, scientists, and electricity. They also showcase the cyclical nature of civilization on a larger scale and how the problematic actions of the past will not always be careful reminders for the future.

Zealots Obsessed With Preservation of Technology

In Canticle, the Flame Deluge is their word for the world-ending nuclear event. Whatever survivors were left, they soon grew skeptical of the knowledge of the old world. There is nothing to be gleaned from the society that allowed these weapons to be researched, created, and used. The anti-intellectual movement was popular in the post-nuclear society, which led to the Simplification — a time where knowledge, and people possessing it, were purged. This led to the creation of the Abbey of St. Leibowitz, a quasi-catholic group of monks that preserve information and technology, hoping it may be used again one day. They toiled away endlessly, recreating schematics and diagrams without knowing their purpose or intent. This abbey was founded by Isaac Leibowitz, an ex-engineer who turned to religion after the war, and this sect played a pivotal part in the novel's storyline and detailing the advancement of technology and post-war civilization. 

In Fallout, an organization mirrors the Abbey of St Leibowitz: The Brotherhood of Steel. While not necessarily Catholic, the BoS does have some quasi-religious undertones, which can be seen in the games and the newly launched Fallout TV Show on Amazon Prime. However, it isn't the catholicism that pairs them together; it's the preservation and collection. The Brotherhood of Steel was founded in 2077 after an ex-U.S. military leader saw the aftermath of horrible human experimentation. This led to their doctrine about preserving technology and safeguarding it from people using it for unscrupulous or bad reasons. Not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison of what Miller imagined the Abbey of St. Leibowitz to be like, but it did set an interesting precedent of an organization that sought to preserve or protect technology against other survivors or factions and what that looks like in a post-nuclear setting. 

Now, there is some writing online about how the team behind Fallout 1 was probably inspired by The Guardian faction from the Wastelander game, but I don’t think it was just that — there was a location named “The Abbey” cut from Fallout 2. Coincidence? No, because Tim Cain expressly designed it and would host the same monks from Miller's work. They were at risk of the Brotherhood of Steel seizing their collection of blueprints, and the plan was to employ the player to help them. I believe this is a nod to Canticle by Cain that the goal of preserving and collecting technology can be carried out and interpreted in highly different ways.

The Brotherhood of Steel’s representation in Fallout: New Vegas also draws from Canticle; they stay isolated in their bunker, unable to decide on actions to take in the wasteland or do anything until the player intervenes. It contrasts the earlier depiction from Fallout 3, where the Brotherhood was fighting Super Mutants in the trenches of Washington D.C. This is a unique world-building apparatus that is present in both works that allows them to explore how society would use and adapt technology they rediscovered, but also have it be semi-reasonable in their alternate timelines of a post-nuclear America.

Doomed to Repeat Civilization’s Mistakes

Both Canticle and Fallout are remarkable because you can see the scale of time and how civilization managed to manifest as a realistic progression of events rather than a post-war fantasy. This idea is known as Retrofuturism and has been a facet of science fiction for a long time—how people write stories in alternate versions of their own society. Both of these stories are an imaginative exercise of the nuclear panic prevalent in society in the 50s and 60s.

The organizations and systems that breathe life into the narrative were cultivated somehow, and learning more about them feels satisfying and — dare I say it — immersive. We can envision this scenario because it is often loosely grounded in laws and structures we interact with daily. However, these societies have an incomplete recollection of history, and a core tenet of Canticle and Fallout is that civilization is bound to make mistakes similar to those before them. 

Both stories tell a gripping narrative about how humanity will repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. In Canticle, the reader learns that the blueprint that was painstakingly recreated in the novel's first part is actually a device used to produce electricity. This comfort was lost during the war and has not been rediscovered since. This device is later created from the blueprints and leads to an enormous technology upheaval so that in the third part, the world is faced again with the threat of nuclear war and eventually succumbs to it.

It is a striking ending to the story, where the reader is taken across thousands of years in this world, only to be shown its demise in the same way it started. Fallout faces this same theme of cyclical civilizations. I mean, one of the most iconic lines from Fallout is “War. War never changes.” I do not think it's Fallout's most prominent theme by any means, but in every game, a faction consolidates power or otherwise stands to conquer and tame the wastes in their own image. 

Interpretation of Relics

Canticle and Fallout both have themes of reverence and duty towards pre-war technology, and to take it a step further, they put great importance into the relics, and their interpretation shapes the culture around them. These stories are only possible because the relics and technology are interpreted by denizens of the new post-cataclysmic event, sometimes to varying degrees of hilarity. The context of some technology and writings will be incredibly unclear, and these people will be left to decipher the meaning and fill in the gaps where there is none. These snippets are their history, all that is left, and they are interested in it just as we are with our origins. 

The Abbey of St. Leibowitz is part of the surviving doctrine of the Catholic Church, somehow surviving the post-war wasteland detailed in Miller's novel. When I first started reading this, I thought it was such an interesting world-building choice to have the Vatican still puttering along 600 years after a world-ending nuclear event. This imagining, however, feels incredibly relatable and understandable; if there were to be any customs or collective information that would survive, it would most likely be something like religion — with its widespread support pre-war and prevalence of religious texts and organizations. This idea of a surviving religious society also still leaves a lot to interpretation, and not all of it mimics what we deem familiar. It is much more interesting this way, seeing how these strange interpretations lead to significant societal shifts. 

One of the most exciting and engaging parts of the Fallout games is how the survivors interpret the relics from the Pre-War era. Just like in Canticle, these survivors lack the context of the original creators, left to derive meaning from what technology and documents somehow survived. My favorite example of this is from Fallout: New Vegas with The Kings — A gang that discovered an Elvis impersonation school and assumed that Elvis was some sort of ruler or deity. They had to glean the meaning of the school and took it upon themselves to continue the traditions found inside, donning leather jackets and slick-backed hair to prove their dedication to this pre-war idol. I could go on about the Enclave, the NCR, or any other group and how these survivors will derive meaning from the scarce remnants of culture and writings that survived the nuclear fallout. 

Conclusion

I have always been interested in the post-apocalyptic nature of the Fallout series, and reading A Canticle for Leibowitz and seeing so many parallels really inspired me. I am not arguing that Tim Cain and his team combed through Miller's novel for parts, but I do believe that Miller helped inspire an entirely new niche of post-nuclear science fiction. It's a fascinating yet tasking read, much like most sci-fi books written around  1959 — you have to give it your full attention. Otherwise, it feels like distant scripture.

What made both of these post-nuclear situations famous is their focus on reclaiming society and the situations and organizations that make it possible. It is not Utopian science fiction; the nuclear reactors did not lead to a long-lasting technologically elevated society. It led to weapons development for a resource war. After humanity almost nukes itself into oblivion, how would humanity scrape itself back together?

The resonance of that premise with many people both in 1959 and today is truly remarkable, and it is no wonder why Amazon's Fallout TV Show launched recently to incredible reviews and receptions.