My Brother Leopold, by Edgar Pangborn (science fiction novella, 1973)

[lb_lee]

"ARTICLE III: The man going by the name Brother Francis is charged with claiming to have begun life miraculously, without father or mother, in the body of a boy about thirteen years of age."

Blurb: An epistolary short story about the fall and rise of Brother Francis/Leopold Graz, who in a post-nuclear apocalypse preached brotherhood and kindness: condemned, burned alive, and then beatified... at a cost.

Why is it worth your time?: Pangborn is a kind writer who tells the story of a boy, his invisible Companion who urges him to great things, and the major front switch that occurs when he is thirteen, which leads to his fall and rise under the pseudo-feudal fundamentalist church afterward. It's pretty good!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, switching, serially singlet, spiritual voices, visions

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Only officially available on paper, but anthologized multiple times; one of them, Still I Persist in Wondering, is screenreadable on archive.org. (Please ignore the pulpy cover.) Available in German and Italian.

Comments

Content Warnings

[lb_lee]

The mother of Leopold (and his brother) dies in childbirth (and the newborn, being mutated, is immediately suffocated--this is a setting where infanticide and intense ableism of congenital disability is a thing). After the big switch, Francis himself is held through a kangaroo court and burnt at the stake, and while his brother helps redeem him, that redemption is at the cost of Leopold/Francis being whitewashed and the brother being imprisoned for "heretical" statements about him.

This is a post-apocalyptic story about religion justifying war and atrocity when it suits them! I didn't consider it a hard read, despite this comment, but keep that in mind!