Gather, Darkness!

Imagine a future in which civilization as we know it has collapsed and has been replaced by a weirdly Dark Ages Medieval style of society in which slack-jawed peasants are ruled by a church and in particular a gang of priests who have set things up for their benefit. These priests use super-science to create miracles and enforce their rule on the people and further blame the ills of the world on hidden witches in mankind's midst. Witches which only they, conveniently enough, can locate. Such a world exists in Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness! 

The story was first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1943 and gathered into a novel first published in 1950. It was Leiber's second novel, the first I'll get around to later this month. The novel concerns itself with a priest named Jarles who suffers from his conscience at the way things are arranged in his world, and in a desperate ploy reveals the truth of the strange society to the minions who are only partially able to comprehend. 

It turns out these priests are opposed by witches, but like the priests these are witches who make use of technology to hoax their enemy and fabricate supposed magic to battle and evade them. The ostensible goal is to free the masses of the yoke the false religion puts on them, but Jarles has grave doubts that this solution is any better than the problem itself. And then he discovers there just might be witches of a different sort, and that changes everything.  

It's fun to follow along and see how Leiber comes up with pseudo-science to mimic magic. His deeper commentary on how people are too easily cowed by the mummery of religion is not lost either. As with any science fiction novel of this type, it's set in the future, but its message is for us in our own time. With the United States in a struggle to stave off a theocratic autocracy the flim-flam that is the center of modern churches is not true belief, but mere hocus-pocus designed to give the user power. 

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