 Initial response to the novel was mixed, but it drew responses from newspapers and magazines normally inattentive to science fiction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was reviewed in such notable publications as Time, The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and The Spectator. While The New Yorker was negative – calling Miller a "dull, ashy writer guilty of heavy-weight irony" – The Spectator's was mixed. Also unimpressed, Time said, "Miller proves himself chillingly effective at communicating a kind of post-human lunar landscape of disaster," but dubbed it intellectually lightweight. The New York Times Book Review, however, was solid in its praise – Martin Levin hailed A Canticle for Leibowitz as an "ingenious fantasy". The Chicago Tribune gave the book unusual exposure outside the genre in a front page review in the Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books, reviewer Edmund Fuller calling the book "an extraordinary novel". Genre reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised its "many passages of remarkable power." A decade later, Time re-characterized its opinion of the book, calling it "an extraordinary novel even by literary standards, [which] has flourished by word of mouth for a dozen years."
