Book Review: Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

Clearly not one of Arthur C. Clarke’s best works.

Childhood’s End begins with the presence of aliens Overlords already established, with a human – U.N. Secretary-General Stormgren – as their mouthpiece. The Overlords begin their occupation as a veiled force that thrusts utopia upon humanity at the cost of humanity’s freedom and cultural identities with their human collaborators appearing to be largely trustful of the aliens’ unknown motives. But are the aliens trustworthy; do they have our best interests in mind? Or do they have some other motive for foisting utopia upon humanity? One would think this would be a major theme of the book but it’s actually not. Instead, the book meanders its way to being an occasionally interesting analysis of human purpose.

The meandering is the book’s greatest flaw as it reads more like a series of loosely connected, extended vignettes rather than having a univocal message, or at least not an obvious one. For instance, with almost a fifth of the book behind us, the U.N. Secretary General is summarily dismissed as a major character as if Clarke didn’t like the direction the book was headed and wrote Stormgren off in order to make a point about how long the Overlords live.

Once the physical presence of the Overlords is revealed, we learn that they look a great deal like something out of popular religious mythology. Next comes a suspension of disbelief as Clarke seems to think the physical characters of the Overlords wouldn’t cause a tremendous amount of consternation, that certain religious peoples of the world would simply accept it as unmeaningful. Nor does Clarke spend much time explaining how the physical look of the Overlords came to be associated with a particular religious mythology.

We don’t get an inkling of the Overlords’ true purpose and motivations until the last quarter of the book which again dabbles with religious overtones (without being too overt). Without giving away too much, there’s a transformation of sorts happening that the long lives of the Overlords make them ideal candidates to help with the conversion. Strangely, at the time the book was written, the transformation probably would have been seen as imaginative. In the modern age, though, I can’t decide if the transformation reads as imaginative or derivative of other ancient mythologies the Overlords do not appear to be directly connected to.

The book is perfectly well written and has some interesting insigts into human behavior and politics. But, it just doesn’t come off with the cohesiveness of other books in Clarke’s catalog. I’m not disappointed that I read this book, but I’m not happy I did either.

Final Score: 6/10