Childhood’s End

I’ve been burn­ing my way through the Top 50 Sci­ence Fic­tion books of the last 50 years. I’ve recent­ly read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Williams Gib­son’s Neu­ro­mancer, and Anne Rice’s Inter­view with a Vam­pire. Cur­rent­ly I am read­ing Robert A. Hein­lein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. I am 28% fin­ished with the list.

Last evening I fin­ished Arthur C. Clarke’s Child­hood’s End. It was a fab­u­lous book.

After fin­ish­ing the last page, clos­ing the book, and sit­ting up straight, I was over­come with awe. Tru­ly, this book was like no oth­er sci­ence fic­tion I had ever read. Was the end­ing pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive? Bit­ter­sweet per­haps? But I get ahead of myself.

Once upon a time, at the begin­nings of the Cold War, man was poised to thrust him­self with reck­less aban­don into the cold embrace of out­er space. Before he could do this how­ev­er, earth was vis­it­ed by what man came to call the Over­lords.

The stew­ard­ship of the Over­lords changes Earth for­ev­er.

The nov­el tells this sto­ry in an inter­est­ing way. Clarke is not that con­cerned with stick­ing with one pro­tag­o­nist in par­tic­u­lar through the entire sto­ry. Indeed he can­not for the sto­ry cov­ers over a cen­tu­ry of human endeav­or. But what struck me was his abil­i­ty to switch from char­ac­ter POV to char­ac­ter POV from para­graph to para­graph and make it work. For Clarke, it seems to me the POV, the thought process, is what should be focused on, not the devel­op­ment of the char­ac­ter, which actu­al­ly appears to be mean­ing­less lat­er on.

It was by no means a dif­fi­cult read. I buzzed through it in sev­er­al hours, but it is engag­ing in its world­view. Sci­ence, and rea­son tend to dom­i­nate the world of SF writ­ing, but Clarke mix­es in mys­ti­cism, and para­psy­chol­o­gy, and meta­physics into his world, and makes the unknown of the human mind more impres­sive than the any tech­nol­o­gy or cul­ture we know or dream of.

I do not want to spoil any of the twists, for the sim­plic­i­ty of the sto­ry is its great­est strength, and that which makes the book so poignant. It feels like some­one real­ly cared for the sto­ry, if you know what I mean. I would rec­om­mend it even if you do not like sci­ence fic­tion. If you do like SF then def­i­nite­ly read it read it read it.