“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.” The United States and the Soviet Union were in the midst of a military space race when large ships appeared in the skies over all the major cities. The aliens have come to keep humans from annihilating themselves. An act of altruism? Or do they have another agenda?The press dubs them THE OVERLORDS, but they much prefer to refer to themselves as The Guardians. They allow humans to govern themselves by whatever means they feel comfortable unless policy decisions involve hurting people. “Man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.” The Overlords also did not approve of hurting animals for sport. In Madrid, when the Spaniards insist on continuing to hold bullfights, a lesson is administered. Every time the bull is stabbed, the pain the animal is feeling is transferred to the audience. No more bullfights.Robotics and computers are advanced to the point that humans are only needed as overseers. Work weeks are cut down to twenty hours a week. (OMG sign me UP.) People are encouraged to go to college, to develop hobbies and skills, and even go back to school several times over their lifetimes to learn something completely new. ”The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.”And for a while the excitement of improving themselves keeps the humans on a spectacular track of not only bettering themselves, but also evolving civilization. Murder has become almost nonexistent, and when passion inspires such aggression, it is only the matter of turning a dial for The Overlords to find the perpetrator. When I google NSA, the National Security Agency of course comes up, but so does No Strings Attached, which I found very ironic. Given the range and the depth of what the NSA knows about all of us, not just US citizens by the way, maybe we should start applying the term The Overlords to the United States government. It would be nice if they would convert all this information into something practical, like catching murderers. Knowing how these things work, they may not want us to know that they are capable of doing that. We might get fearful of our government. Barrage balloons over London during World War II. Clarke observed balloons like these floating over the city in 1941. He recalls that his earliest idea for the story may have originated with this scene, with the giant balloons becoming alien ships in the novel.It seems to be the fate of all Utopias to turn leisure into sloth and turn unlimited possibilities into boredom. Interesting that Arthur C. Clarke uses the advancement of Television technology to be a major contributor to the degradation of a perfect society. People became passive sponges--absorbing but never creating.” Clarke mentions that people in this society started watching television three hours per day. Rookies! The latest statistics that I saw mentioned that Americans now watch five hours of television a day on average.Obviously, I don’t watch television five hours a day as can be ascertained by how many books I read a year. If the Kansas City Royals are playing, I do watch about three hours, but I’m also still reading and researching while the game is on. Baseball is the perfect background noise for doing just about anything, including taking a much needed nap to rest the noggin for a few minutes. When people ask me how I read so many books a year and still work full time, I usually ask them how much time they spend watching television or playing with their cell phone or playing games on their iPad? Everyone has the same number of hours in their day; it just depends on how you choose to use them. I choose to read. People who read fewer books than me are making different choices or in some cases may have more obligations. Of course, this is relevant only because I see reading as the best way to evolve the mind. I’m old fashioned that way.“There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.”There are concerns voiced by various religious groups and also by people who are not thrilled about humans losing their ability to govern themselves, but for the majority of people the lack of responsibility and the lack of ambition to succeed are concepts they readily embrace. A society that was evolving to the greatest heights of artistic and progressive achievements starts to prefer apathy. The Overlords are very careful to control what the humans learn about them. A man named Jan Rodericks stows away on one of their ships and sees a world he can barely comprehend. “And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets with radiations which would be instantly lethal to all earthly forms of life. For millions of kilometers around extended great veils of gas and dust, fluorescing in countless colors as the blasts of ultraviolet tore through them. It was a star against which Earth’s pale sun would have been as feeble as a glowworm at noon.” In one of those time travelling, mind bending events that I always have trouble fully comprehending, Jan only ages a few months, but has missed eighty years on Earth. The Overlords make allusion to the fact that science can destroy religions, but that science is not the top of the mountain, but only a stepping stone to a much greater understanding of life. They search through our archives looking for information on the paranormal and other elements that have been written about outside the realm of science. When the children of earth start to develop telekinetic powers, the true reasons for The Overlords being our guardians becomes clear. We also learn that the Overlords defer to another power much greater than their own capabilities called The Overmind. I caught a commercial for the six hour miniseries that the Syfy Channel is planning to launch in December and realized that I have hauled a copy of this book around with me for a couple of decades without reading it. Sometimes we need one more push. As always I’m impressed with Arthur C. Clarke’s ability to tackle the bigger issues and to be somewhat controversial in his presentation of the best and worst of being human. It does seem that we are incapable of possessing true happiness for very long. We are designed for strife, for pain, for joy, and ambitious achievement. When any of those elements are removed from the equation, we start to falter. Joy can only be fully appreciated if we experience pain. Ambition can only be relished if strife was overcome to achieve it. As The Overlords fix all the problems, there is a huge cost, too big of a cost, in that we lose what makes us unique. It is disappointing to think that harmony and lack of fear will turn us into beings unworthy of admiration. When defense is no longer a primary objective, it is disheartening to believe that the energy previously expended on security can not be transferred to higher levels of achievement in the arts, philosophy, music, and literature. To be the best that we can be, we still need the growl of the Sabretooth tiger coming from just beyond the edge of the firelight. We still need to be capable of picking up a club and saying “here kitty, kitty, kitty.”This is a short book, power packed with ideas and concepts, and certainly deserving of inclusion in the list of classic, influential, science-fiction books. See all my recent book and movie reviews at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
My words in this review would continue to remain insufficient to fully describe the phenomena within the pages of this book, and the breadth of literary experiences that Arthur C. Clarke had given me when he wrote Childhood's End. This is a science fiction novel that explored the complex relationship between beginnings and endings, and the unfathomable scale of the evolution process. Clarke, however, tried to capture the essence of such bold concepts in his story, and so I feel that I also have a duty to do the same in writing the review.I first saw this book two years ago and the cover (as you can see in the photo opposite this review) was so captivating. It was this particular book that jump-started my hunt for other SF Masterworks (I have 12 of them in my collection so far). I have no regrets about buying this book, and reading it at a point in my life where I'm also voyaging through new horizons while saying my goodbyes to past lives.I always read the introductions when a book has one so I was spoiled earlier on about the staggering revelation concerning the alien "overlords" who have come to Earth and, instead of invading the planet, the overlords launched a long-term strategy to save it from falling into its own nuclear destruction. If anyone has watched the sci-fi series V, the second chapter of that event resembled the first scenes of the pilot episode of that show, and perhaps Clarke's book was the inspiration for it. But that's the only thing this book and that show share. Childhood's End stands on another level of storytelling altogether. And it's one so subtle in delivery that when it expanded across the pages without warning, I almost wanted to clutch at my chest just to make sure it's still beating.I don't take it lightly whenever I describe a book as "beautiful" and most of the time, I would use that general description to convey beauty not as an abstraction but more of an expression of spiritual fulfillment that such a story can only cause. I'm not sure if that is enough of an appraisal for Clarke's masterpiece, so perhaps I could do one better by saying that not since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen had a literary piece left me raw and reeling from the experience. In just 237 pages, I was transported into a world that is ripe with possibilities which is the endgame of a genre like science fiction. Clarke's story was beautiful not because it revealed some apocalyptic wasteland so often depicted in futuristic stories that also serve as cautionary tales that deal with everyone's fears concerning our world's mistakes and negligence. No, Childhood's End, despite of its misleading, ominous title, is about a future that leads inevitably to transcendence. Human beings will evolve even if it means ending the chapters of greatness that humanity was recognized for. It's also a reassuring message that we should not fear our mortality for every ending always leads to new beginnings and that in itself should be comforting enough.The build-up to this pay-off was suspenseful enough though there are times you would think it would be uneventful. I felt like Clarke played a cruel trick on me, too. He would alternate between focusing the camera lens of his writing with the general atmosphere/environment of what the future looks like thanks to the Overlords's continuous supervision among human nations, and then zoom in to the focus characters that help contextualize and humanize the events and changes that the planet is undergoing. I was almost ready to believe that nothing so astounding will happen once the story nears a conclusion--and I was dead wrong.Since the illuminating final moments of the book caught me off-guard, all I could do was close my eyes and imagine if whatever Clarke has created in Chilhood's End will ever happen someday--and I actually want it to. There's just a sense of wholeness, of balance and equilibrium, in the way the story reached its climax. It was then that I was also thankful that I read the introduction because I was able to appreciate the way Clarke approached and weaved the concepts of parenthood and childhood in his story with a discerning and poignant interpretation. I do recommend, however, to just go read the story first then come back to the introduction to avoid the spoiler therein.Childhood's End enabled readers to experience not just scientifically but philosophically what exactly happens when children outlive their parents; how generations in the past need to decay in order for future landscapes to be had. It certainly made me think about the way my parents raised me. It made me wonder if they see me not really an extension of their genes but as the death to their own existence and relevance--and it must be so terrifying that we just don't acknowledge it.Still, as cruelly eye-opening that epiphany was, I was glad it happened to me because of this book, and now I can love my parents more fiercely than before, knowing fully well now that my survival means that their lives ultimately will not be in vain.RECOMMENDED: 10/10 *YOU NEED TO READ THIS, WHOEVER YOU ARE.
What do You think about Childhood's End (1987)?
Childhood’s End: The Overlords have a plan for usOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureThere's something very comforting in the SF novels of Arthur C. Clarke, my favorite of the Big Three SF writers of the Golden Age (the other two being Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov). His stories are clearly-written, unembellished, precise, and focus on the science, ideas, and plot. Though some claim his characters are fairly wooden, I don’t see it that way. They tend to be fairly level-headed and logical, and focus on handling the situations on hand in an intelligent manner. In Clarke's world, the average protagonist is a smart and scientific-minded person, much like...the author himself. And I think his target audience is also readers who think scientific progress will steadily continue, bringing humans further and further along a path of enlightenment and shedding the foolish superstitions of the past (i.e. organized religions, antiquated political and social conventions).And then we have Childhood's End. I won't bother describing the entire plot of this SF classic from 1953, beyond the basic conceit that super-advanced aliens (dubbed "Overlords") suddenly descend on Earth and, instead of bringing death and destruction like the Martians of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, they immediately impose a benevolent rule over mankind and swiftly solve all of the political, social, racial, and religious problems plaguing the planet, not least of all imminent nuclear destruction (a reasonable fear considering the timing of the book). The only catch is that the Overlords refuse to explain the motivations for their altruistic intervention, indicating only that they are Supervisors in charge of helping mankind for some unknown ultimate goal.So what is the catch then? Clarke builds the story slowly and reveals things at a very measured pace, and we don't find out what the Overlords are really up to until the final 50 pages or so. This is actually the biggest weakness of the story, because the small glimpses of the Overlord’s gradually grooming of the human race for SOMETHING BIG don’t really seem to connect very well with the final denouement. And since the final 50 pages are a fairly mind-blowing vision of the transformation of mankind, I would’ve preferred if Clarke devoted more pages to this and less to the lead-up. It’s like having to listen to the opening act for a full 90 minutes, and then having the headline band play an amazing set of just 3-4 songs and waltz off stage with the crowd crying out for more. Then again, sometimes the best books leave you hungry for more, and let your imagination fill in the details.Arthur C. Clarke is without question a SF writer with a wealth of ideas, but I think he owes a huge debt to two of his British predecessors, both visionaries of enormous talent and ambition, H.G. Wells (The Time Machine in particular) and Olaf Stapledon's (Last and First Men, Star Maker). Although I think those other works are superior in their scopes and execution, I certainly enjoyed Childhood's End and think it deserves its position as a classic of the genre.
—Stuart
I am a fan of science fiction, and I wanted to read Childhood's End after hearing it is supposedly one of the best novels in the sci-fi genre. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I just didn't enjoy it.I won't belabor this review by posting a synopsis; I'll just summarize my general impression of the book (SPOILERS ahead).First off, the characterization is extremely weak. I understand that some science fiction is more plot driven than character driven, but I still think it is important to w
—Elizabeth
The most frightening of all prospects would be a disruption of our daily routines, no matter how mundane they may be. The appearance of a stranger in your life, an entity we cannot comprehend tearing its way into the fabric of your world or a natural disaster that throws all man made things to the wind have all thus become material for the genre of horror. Oft repeated and many a time thinly veiled is a common thread in horror and sci fi genres : an alien race appearing like a bolt from the blue and casting a shadow over the natives. When Roland Emmerich's Independence day came out I was a schoolgoer and I remember freezing the frame on the TV, getting out and looking at the sky to see if there really were any outlandish vessels up there ! Through countless books and movies the message was blared again and again : An alien race comes only to wage war with you and to shed blood . How wrong Arthur C. Clarke proved them all to be !This is truly a horror story but the true impact of the plot is never felt until the penultimate chapter. The plot moves along and the author drops clues that something big is coming but when the final blow lands, the devastation it causes is unparalleled. I can't go too much into the details but I must say that the effect this story had on me was in many ways similar to 1984. The way of the alien invasion in this story and the effects it has on humanity as a race are disturbing to say the least. A world of difference lies between the aliens that Clarke conjures and the ones I have seen to date. The aliens (overlords) are intensely cerebral and their activities and actions all seem to resound of this enhanced levels of intellectual activity. These make them all the more frightening in their ruthless efficiency to get things done. Don't create images resembling the Xenomorph from the Alien series or the Yautja from Predator in your mind, those guys are as harmless as puppies when compared to what Clarke presents you with. It is a mark of legerdemain on the part of the author in the way that the title of the novel is explained towards the end of the book.A marvellous little book and one I want to read again. Someday in the future !
—Arun Divakar
