I just hope it doesn't turn out like the plot of A Canticle For Leibowitz. God, that book's depressing at the end.
A brief summa (warning: spoilers):
Nuclear war destroys the infrastructure of the planet, destroying civilisation. After the fallout stops, well, falling, mobs turn against the people who made that war possible, i.e. the intelligentsia. Soon, it turns into outright barbarism, with book burnings and mass murder of scientists, doctors, technicians, anyone with an education. But a chap called Isaac Leibowitz managed to salvage some of the books, as was his charge by the Pope. He was a monk, you see. This is an instance of religion doing good, rare enough in real life but positively nonexistant in sci-fi. His body is found hundreds of years later by a chap called Francis who is later killed for his illuminated blueprint. And his flesh.
Fast forward about a millenium and we have act two: secular organisations for the advancement of knowledge have been set up, and literacy rates are steadily improving. Of course, another war breaks out between the Holy See and Texarkana, a city-state under despotic and mind-numbingly barbaric rule. In the midst of all this, a monk and a scholar create electric light.
In the final act, eight hundred years after the second act, humans have progressed beyond the level they had when the nuclear war started, to the point where space colonisation and faster-than-light ship travel are, whilst not exactly commonplace, certainly viable. Nuclear arms are now illegal, but it doesn't stop what is now America blooding up most of Eastern Asia with a test warhead. The Asians respond in kind, dropping a space-based warhead on the Yank capital, Texarkana. The monks of Sacred Order of Leibowitz have to open up their doors to irradiated victims of fallout clouds, and their abbot sends them off to a colony. They can't com back, and as they watch the mushroom clouds rise beneath their ship, they probably have no wish to.
And, because it is the way of all things, the events prior to the start of the the book happen all over again...
Only worse.
OK, it wasn't exactly brief, but it needed to be said.
