Childhood's End

I first read Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” when I was myself a child. My brother and I were in a race to read all of the world’s “greatest literature”, and this book had come up as one example of the great Science Fiction of all time. It also happened to be available in our hometown’s library, which is a primary concern when the only transportation you can access is a bike.It was a small book, so it received a slot somewhere between “Don Quixote” and Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. In our family we were forbidden to watch movies, so I had never even heard of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Nothing prepared me for the experience of Clarke’s writing.In the prologue “great ships descended in their overwhelming majesty.” Then we skip over the first encounter and go right to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Stormgren, being carried up in a metal bubble to attend his regularly-scheduled meeting with the alien Karellan, “fifty kilometers above the earth” (p. 20). As always, their conversation takes place by way of a “vision screen” which allows Stormgren to be seen but which obscures Karellan.What is Karellan? What does he look like? What is desired by the alien race that he represents?Clarke masterfully lets us develop our own inquiries. Slowly he answers them, but in a way that raises still more questions. The revelation of Karellan’s true form is particularly effective when realized this way.The story jumps over decades. The questions grow deeper. Clarke is the teacher. It is the questions that matter, the answers are beside the point.It is a strange story to read in our day, when easy answers are always at our fingertips. Why did Stanley Kubrick choose to collaborate with a writer who had a reputation as a recluse? You can Google it. We have facts at our fingertips. The answers come to us instantaneous, like our burgers and our fries.This alien race to which Karellan belongs, our Overlords, give us the power to see into the past using an instrument—“nothing more than a television receiver”—“on permanent loan to the World History Foundation” (p. 74). Upon seeing the “true beginnings of the world’s great faiths … mankind’s multitudinous messiahs … lost their divinity” (p. 74-75). Knowledge comes at the cost of the ancient gods.There is a kind of utopia that emerges, well in line with millennial theology but equally comfortable to those who prefer Hegel or historical materialism. Clarke takes no position. It is enough to show that the human race “matures.”Clarke manages to maintain tension by continuously drawing attention to the question, “What lies at the end of progress?” An uneasiness predominates, reaching into dinner parties, family life, unsettling leisure. A weight presses down upon humanity.Clarke takes us through to the end, answers all of the questions that he can with the objectivity of an impartial observer. He delivers fireworks and foreboding in equal measure.C.S. Lewis supposedly said, in 1956, that this book, “Childhood’s End,” is the greatest Science Fiction of all. He certainly called it “AN ABSOLUTE CORKER!” (along with a lot of other praise in a 1953 personal letter to Joy Davidman-Gresham).Returning to the novel now, as an adult, I value the questions that Clarke raises. More than that, I get lost in his thoughts, swept away.I cannot imagine a maturity that comes from knowing all of the answers, that exists in possessing the technology which delivers to us our daily bread. Progress is not “the true and only heaven”, much as Christopher Lasch argued.There remains something wonderful to be found in not knowing it all, in wondering how it all turns out. It is still hidden there, beckoning to us, patiently waiting for us to look up from our electronic screens long enough to notice that a universe more vast than any ocean exists. The mind has room enough to roam.There is a magnificence in raising questions, in puzzling over mysteries, in imagining. “I think, therefore I am.”Arthur C. Clarke certainly understood that. In writing “Childhood’s End” he performs a miracle, a story that is as enjoyable closer to the end of life as it is nearer to its beginning. It is the best kind of speculation.

[A word of warning: This review contains all manner of spoilers.]I read Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End many years ago. I also read it to my son when he was eight. So why did I come back to a book that was originally published in 1953, read it yet again, and feel it necessary to write a review?What got me thinking about Childhood's End again is the emergence of the Internet as force for change within the Global Community. Also, my limited experience teaching university students impressed upon me the impact that the Internet is having on the minds of our young people.As a novelist myself and an author of a book on how to write a novel, I first must say that Childhood's End is marvelously plotted. It starts off with a startling revelation: Earth is not only being visited by extraterrestrials, called Overlords, but they have come to take over the world, prevent our annihilation, and impose restrictions on human activities that will insure not only our survival but also that we prosper. This then locks the conflict (first plot point) between humans and ET, and as with so much of Clarke's fiction, the conflict is at a relatively low level. ET, or the Overlords in this case, is here to help.When one group, the Freedom League, wishes to oppose the Overlords more forcefully, they are soon subdued, non-violently. The one thing the Overlords will not do is show themselves. Humans make an attempt at seeing one of them, but don't get away with it. As a result, the Overlords agree to let them see them, but not for another fifty years, two generations. This then is the second plot point, which occurs 20% of the way through the story, a little short of where you'd expect it.As time drags on, humanity loses its edge. We are no longer as creative as we once were, and culturally we have stagnated. Utopia is never all it's cracked up to be. And the time finally comes when the Overlords reveal their physical selves, and a strange sight they are, and yet immediately recognizable. They are the very image of Satan, red skin, horns, and pointed tail, leathery wings. No wonder they'd been so secretive. However, since they had shown their goodwill through the years, little was made of their "coincidental" resemblance to an ancient symbol of evil. This revelation comes at the 1/3 point and a little beyond what we'd think of as the second plot point and well short of 1/2 point that we'd think of as the third plot point.At the mid-point of the novel, we get a true reversal. At a party, guests play a game similar to a Ouija Board. One of the participants asks, "Which star is the Overlords' home?" And the answer they get back is "NGS 549672." Only one of the guests realizes that this is a database entry for a star forty lightyears away in the constellation Carina. This person then starts making plans to stowaway on the next Overlord spaceship to their home. The Overlords have subdued the humans up until this point, but now one of them is on the hunt to find out more than the Overlords wish them to know. This is plot point three.Just before the three-quarters point, one of the earthlings stows away on the Overlords' spaceship and leaves earth with them. His journey there and back will take eighty years, Earth time, but just a few months in relativistic time above the rocket traveling at close to the speed of light. Just a little later, at the three-quarters point in the novel, a strange event occurs. An Overlord saves one of the human children. For some reason the Overlords believe he is special. And then children all over the world start having strange dreams and developing telekinetic powers. This is what the Overlords have waited for all this time.At the end of the novel, we learn that what the story has been about all along is the children. The human race is entering a new phase, one that will only manifest in our children. They are becoming something other than human beings and metamorphosing into something that transcends human existence. It's as if the worm finally becames a butterfly. And we learn that those who have been known as the Overlords are actually only caretakers of the human race while it undergoes the transformation into something spiritually superior to human beings. The children no longer relate to their parents, and the parents have no knowledge of their children. It's a clean break.As it turns out, the Overlords are a tragic species. They cannot and never will make the transformation to this higher plane. And they take their orders from yet a higher power, the power that then comes for the children of mankind. The Overlords are a dead-end species from another world and can only witness the process, foster it, but never undergo it themselves.The denouement comes with the man who had hitched a ride on the Overlords spaceship and gone to their home planet. He returns after eighty years, having seen the home of the Overloads and what a magnificent species they are. But he is the only human being left on earth, and he witnesses the end of the human race.One other interesting facet of Clarke's novel is that, since the story is spread over 150 years or so, he uses a series of third-person limited narrations. He skips from character to character as his story dictates. He even uses a couple of the Overlords as point-of-view characters. This he does with skill, so it never seems artificial or lacking knowledge of craft. Always professionally executed.Perhaps you can now see why I was so interested in taking another look at this story. Our children of today are growing up in the presence of the Internet, something no science fiction writer saw coming. And yet, it seems to me that Arthur C. Clarke did, in a sense, see it coming in this story. Our texting, blogging, FaceBooking neophytes to the human race are a strange species with unusual powers developed by virtue of the Internet. They are leaving us behind, and heaven knows what they'll become in the future. It does appear that they are making a clean break from what the human race has been. Let's just hope that they can store away a little of our humanity for future reference.

The human race has taken its first tentative steps into space and is dreaming of visiting other planets, when its plans are changed forever by the arrival of alien spaceships. The aliens seem benign, although they quickly put an end to human space travel. They also end war and animal cruelty, and usher in a utopian period where no-one goes hungry and no-one has to work if they don’t want to. Known only as the Overlords, they don’t allow the humans to see them, communicating only by voice. It seems that they allow humans to organise their own affairs, but their influence over the United Nations (gradually becoming a world government) certainly steers things in the direction they want Earth to go. All the good results of their background rule mean that humanity is happy to go along, for the most part.But some people are aware that, without the struggle for survival and advancement, creativity is being destroyed and science is becoming moribund. So they set up a small colony, with the willing consent of the Overlords, where they hope to allow music, art and science to flourish. Still, however, no-one knows what the Overlords’ ultimate plan is – all they know is that they have promised to reveal themselves to humanity in fifty years...This is a book I wanted to love, but found didn’t live up to my expectations. Unfortunately most of the things that disappointed me a little will take me close to spoiler territory, so forgive any vagueness caused by my attempt to avoid that. The first and major thing is that I didn’t believe for a moment that humanity would happily submit en masse to a race of aliens who told us what to do, however apparently benign their intentions. We don’t even submit to our democratically elected governments half the time! When I said that the unelected UN was turning into a world government, did you think “oh, that’s a good idea”? No, nor me. So the fundamental premise of the book left me floundering around looking for my lost credulity before it even really got underway.The second thing is that the hidden appearance of the aliens is made much of, and when the big reveal finally happened, it made me laugh. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to! It was clearly intended to be all metaphysical and philosophical and stuff like that, but it just struck me as kinda silly, especially when Clarke attempted to explain the relevance. I understand from my friend Wikipedia that the idea originated in an earlier short story of Clarke’s, but that, although he changed all the meaning for the book, he left in all references to a different meaning from the short story. This probably explains why I found it messy and unconvincing. Plus it was signalled so far in advance that the only surprise was that it didn’t come as a surprise.The third thing may not be Clarke’s fault – the basic storyline felt as if I’d read and watched it a million times or so before. Still avoiding spoilers as much as possible, it’s the old theme of what will the end result of evolution be, and Wells was asking that question fifty years earlier. Clarke’s answer is different to Wells’ but similar to many others since then. Now maybe Clarke was the first – the book was published in 1953 – in which case I apologise to him. But it meant I wasn’t excited by it – I found it pretty predictable and it therefore felt as if it took an awful long time getting there.On the upside, it’s well written and the ending is left ambiguous, which makes it thought-provoking. With all of these how-will-humanity-end-up stories, the question has to be if it’s a future we would seek, or seek to avoid. Often authors tell us – the future is either utopian or dystopian; it’s decided for us in advance. Here that question is open, allowing the reader to use her own imagination to, effectively, write the sequel. I feel many sci-fi shows, films and books may have been trying to write that sequel for years, consciously or subconsciously. And, indeed, it’s a theme Clarke returned to himself in the later 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was after reading Childhood’s End that Stanley Kubrick invited Clarke to collaborate with him on the project that would eventually result in the book and film of Space Odyssey, and together they created a much better and more internally coherent story, in my opinion, while retaining that ambiguity which lifts this one above the average, despite my criticisms of it.Overall, then, it didn’t wow me as much as I’d hoped, but I’m still glad to have read it, partly because it’s considered a classic in its own right, and partly because I was intrigued to read the book that inspired Kubrick. The fact that Kubrick, who at that time was reading science fiction voraciously looking for inspiration, found the ideas original suggests to me that a major part of my disappointment comes from reading the book too late, after years of reading and watching other people creating variations on the theme.

It’s been over 20 years since I last read Childhood’s End. Childhood’s End was certainly one of the most striking, and haunting, works of fiction that I read when I was younger.I enjoyed re-reading the book. The forboding, the horror, the mystery, are all still very much there. But, so too is Clarke’s racism, and sexism, and a rather narrow view of the world that believes that religion is just a mere superstition that will one day fade away.Childhood’s End is one of the classics of Sci-Fi for a reason, but I don’t think I’ll be returning for another 20 years.

It’s not surprising that this book is part of the ‘Gollancz SF Masterworks’ series. It really is a must read for all sci-fi fans as one of those early sci-fi books that set the standard for others to follow.The prophetic nature of this book, while quite nail-on-head in some ways, is quite funny at times as to how short it actually fell. For example, Arthur thought that it would take aliens to bring an end to wars, giving humanity peace ever lasting before we gave up striving to improve our lives and instead spending hours every day watching pointless programs on TV… Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges — absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!And yet here we are 60 years after this book was published and while no aliens have given us peace on earth and eternal leisure people are watching far more TV than Arthur predicted for our age of enlightenment. The 2018 veiwing figures for the UK is an average of over 4 hours a day. And that’s the average. Some people are watching far more than that as people like myself have no television at all and haven’t had for over 20 years.No it’s not taking aliens to bring an end to Homo sapiens, the wise man is doing a really good job of its own demise without any outside assistance whatsoever… ‘In a few years, it will all be over, and the human race will have divided in twain. There is no way back, and no future for the world you know. All the hopes and dreams of your race are ended now. You have given birth to your successors, and it is your tragedy that you will never understand them — will never even be able to communicate with their minds. Indeed, they will not possess minds as you know them. They will be a single entity, as you yourselves are the sums of your myriad cells. You will not think them human, and you will be right.Yes, we are becoming two separate species, with the old conservative Homo sapiens stuck in their ways, trying in vain to hold the world back while the progressive and future looking people are slowly evolving beyond the comprehension of those who cling to their ancient rights. It won’t be long now before Homo sapiens becomes extinct, because, as Arthur says, the stars are not for man.All that said, it’s a great book. Wonderfully written, thought provoking, intelligent sci-fi for progressive and future looking people who look towards the stars instead of into televisions.

This is another awe inspiring novel by the British SF master. Mysterious aliens appear in the sky over Earth and somehow become benevolent dictators over the whole planet. But the aliens' own motives are not at all straightforward, neither as benevolent as many humans take them to be, yet at the same time not evil in the normal sense of the word. The denouement was sad and wonderful (in the literal sense of inspiring wonder), and very thought provoking about the role of different species towards each other. I didn't think this novel was quite as consistently wonderful as The CIty and the Stars or Rendezvous with Rama as I thought it sagged just a little in the middle, but the initial chapters were intriguing and the final few mind boggling in their implications for both the human race and their new alien overlords. A great read.

I read this book in my youth, and remember how vivid and memorable some of the imagery was. The image of children round a pillar of light, that is the collective overmind has stayed with me until now.Recently I watched the TV series, and then re-read the book, as I wanted to see what had changed, and I couldn't remember the story. Whilst the TV series has the main events from the book, and some of the main characters, the flow is completely different, and the shape of the events is chronologically different, although the ending is roughly the same. A modern update.So, the book was first published in the 50s, and retains all that decades styles and attitudes. It has no modern 'realism' (or technology), and no 'action' sequences. It is largely historical/philosophical in nature, with some strong poetic imagery. Clarke dives in, on a personal level, to show people's reactions to the monumental events occurring to society. Those interactions with the characters are flawed by the dated writing, but are nonetheless not too distracting, merely giving it period feel. Like reading an HG Wells story.I still like this story. It carries the reader along, and never gets boring, even though it feels slightly old fashioned. The imagery is still inspiring, and of course, the idea of benevolent aliens is still different from the usual 'Alien/Predator' axis. For which I am very grateful!Read it yourself; it's not long, and if Science Fiction is your thing, then the ideas that Clarke creates are stunning. Well worth a read.