Book Review: Childhood’s End

Arthur C. Clarke
1953
Nominations: Retro Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

I just finished Childhood’s End, and I have to say I am really disappointed.

I am a Clarke fan. I really liked the Rama series, and Fountains of Paradise, and 2001 (the movie). I am in awe of how he seemed to be able to see decades into the technological future. But this book—which, to be fair, is one of his earlier novels—just seemed like a halfhearted warm-up for his later work.

Childhood’s End does contain several pieces of futuristic technology which stand up extremely well even now, more than fifty years later. But the story has very little in the way of character likeability, or suspense, or excitement. The plot meanders and drags badly. And, in many places, it also is a pretty embarrassing display of Clarke’s sexism—which is easier to ignore when the story is good.

The book starts out well, with a scene straight out of Independence Day (although it would be more accurate to say that Independence Day starts out with a scene straight out of this book). Sometime in the mid-twentieth century, on the eve of the launch of one of Earth’s first satellites, a fleet of enormous alien ships arrives at our planet. The ships position themselves in the sky over every major city in the world. The chief alien—Supervisor Karellen—broadcasts one speech, in English, over all of Earth’s radio frequencies, announcing that national governments are now irrelevant, and that the aliens will be enforcing peaceful and beneficial conditions around the world, whether the humans like it or not.                                                      

For five years the ships just hover and the aliens never show themselves, but they are able to enforce the kinds of behavior they want through drones and rays and other sophisticated pieces of technology. They are able, for example, to prevent us from killing each other en masse by destroying any missiles that we fire at each other.

The only contact the humans have with the aliens (whom the humans have begun calling the Overlords) is through the Secretary General of the United Nations, Rikki Stormgren. Stormgren is periodically brought up into the ship hovering over New York, where he converses with Overlord Supervisor Karellen through a one-way mirror.

Even though the aliens are supposedly benevolent and are theoretically helping humanity by preventing them from doing stupid things to each other, the humans, of course, rankle at being controlled. Some countries try to attack the ships with nuclear bombs, but the bombs just evaporate on the ships’ surfaces. There is a little bit of a minor kerfuffle when Stormgren is kidnapped by a fringe resistance group in an attempt to get the aliens to show themselves, but Karellen is able to bust Stormgren out relatively easily.

Finally, fifty years later, the aliens decide humanity is used to their presence enough to actually reveal themselves. And it’s a good thing the aliens waited, because they are terrifying: twice our size and shaped exactly like devils, complete with horns and bat wings.

By now, though, most humans don’t care. They have been lulled into a dead stupor caused by the complete elimination of any challenge in the form of war, disease, poverty, famine, or crime. This stupor, unfortunately for us (and, as it turns out, purposefully on the part of the aliens) extends to any expression of human creativity. There is hardly any more real effort to engage in art or music or writing, and there is no more serious pursuit of science. The aliens particularly discourage any kind of investigation into alien technology, or the aliens’ origins, or any kind of space travel or astrophysics.

One human, Jan Rodricks, clinging to a shred of scientific curiosity, stows away on one of the alien ships returning to the Overlords’ home world. The aliens discover him mid-flight, but let him continue his journey.

Another group of people tries to fight the boredom by founding an island colony of the last people left who are interested in art and science, but it doesn’t really amount to much. They mainly pursue dilettante interests and hold boring parties where they have interminably immature and gossipy conversations.

Eventually, after much screwing around, the Overlords reveal their ultimate purpose, which is to prepare the current generation of children to be turned into little conduits, mindless accessories to a universal Overmind. The children eventually stop talking to their parents and start spending all their time in little meditative comas. This leads, inevitably, to the end of the human race.

The book’s ending is told from Jan Rodrick’s point of view as he returns home. Because of the relativistic time distortion from near-light-speed space travel, he returns home after all of the people that he knew are long dead, and all that is left are the weird Overmind children. And as soon as he get there, they begin casting all water and life forms out into space, in preparation for joining the Overmind. In a psychedelic scene that seems like a less powerful, less coherent rehearsal for the ending of 2001, Rodrick describes the destruction of Earth and his unification with the cosmos with sweeping galactic scope.

As I said, one thing that Clarke does still have going for him in this book is his technological prescience. In one otherwise tedious party scene, for example, the host pretends to answer the door for his guests using a realistic holographic projection tool similar to those now used in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

Clarke also invents a nascent form of virtual reality as an entertainment tool for his artist colony. He (adorably) describes it as an outgrowth of the “art of the cartoon film:”

    “First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses...When the goal was achieved, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary…and when the ‘program’ was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.”

However, none of this makes up for the plodding, slow-paced story, which consists mostly of conversations between his characters. Isaac Asimov could pull off this type of narrative because the ideas his characters talk about are interesting and exciting in themselves. But Clarke's characters' ideas are not; the conversations are mostly sophomoric and do nothing to further the action (such action as there is).

It also does not make up for the seedy sexism. This ranges from relatively minor incidents, such as how the women in the artist colony are somewhat condescendingly described as all taking up knitting together and knitting sweaters for all their menfolk, to more egregious ones like the conscious resignation of wives to the “fundamentally polygamous” nature of men and the resulting public series of mistresses their husbands must have.

Forty-six years later, Greg Bear wrote a book called Darwin’s Radio, which also had a plot which included the near-instant change of humanity from one species to another within one generation. Bear’s new species also included a new breed of highly empathic, emotionally interconnected children. But Bear’s novel is much better at what it does, with a comparatively interesting plot and without the 1950s era baggage.