The Quest for Saint Aquin
short story by Anthony Boucher
"The Quest for Saint Aquin" is a science fiction short story by American writer Anthony Boucher (1911–1968), originally published in 1951 in New Tales of Space and Time.
"The Quest for Saint Aquin" was among the stories selected in 1970 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the best science fiction short stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards. As such, it was published in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964. It was also selected by the English novelist and critic Kingsley Amis in 1981 as the first story in his The Golden Age of Science Fiction: An Anthology.
Plot summary
The Earth of one thousand years hence has both post-apocalyptic elements (radiation/fallout has rendered some regions uninhabitable, roads have deteriorated to un-usability, vast amounts of historical knowledge have been lost) and super-tech elements (robots proliferate, interplanetary travel is routine, two other planets have been colonized). Religion has been banned by the ruling "Technarchy" and the Catholic Church has gone underground, relying on secret cells and symbols as in the days of the early church. The central character is a crypto-priest named Thomas who is charged by the crypto-pope with finding and reporting on the final resting place of a semi-legendary figure called Aquin. The mysterious Aquin had been an evangelist of great power who converted all those who listened to him preach, and his body allegedly did not deteriorate after his death. The Pope believes that this miracle, if true, will be a powerful tool in winning new converts.
Thomas is provided with an intelligent multi-terrain transport vehicle called a robass ("robotic ass"), to assist him in locating and visiting Aquin's tomb.
“The Quest for Saint Aquin” enters the record as short story by Anthony Boucher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quest, Saint and Aquin can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Quest for Saint Aquin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.