Blurb:

Childhood’s End is one of the defining legacies of Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and many other groundbreaking works. Since its publication in 1953, this prescient novel about first contact gone wrong has come to be regarded not only as a science fiction classic but as a literary thriller of the highest order.
 
Spaceships have suddenly appeared in the skies above every city on the planet. Inside is an intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior alien race known as the Overlords. At first, their demands seem benevolent: unify Earth, eliminate poverty, end war. But at what cost? To those who resist, it’s clear that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. Has their arrival marked the end of humankind . . . or the beginning?

Review:

Arthur C. Clarke is one of those giants of the SF genre that I’d never actually read, despite having been familiar with his name both through cultural osmosis and the adaptations of his work (namely Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Peter Hyams’ 2010: The Year We Make Contact). I’ve had Rendezvous with Rama on my TBR ever since the announcement that Denis Villeneuve would be adapting it for the screen, but even so it was Childhood’s End that recently served as my first proper introduction to the prose of Arthur C. Clarke. I had a work trip coming up and had recently picked Childhood’s End up from my local Half Price Books; and given the size and thickness of the book I selected it as one of my “airplane reading” books (historically my most productive reading time, trapped in a steel tube with no internet). 

And I tore through it. 

With authors like Clarke, those of a certain pedigree of SF prestige, I often never read the back-cover blurbs of their books, I simply pick one to read and dive right in; and it was with this lack of preconceptions that Childhood’s End became a near non-stop flood of amazement. Years of work in various creative fields have given me a pretty good understanding of the most common - and even many uncommon - story structures, but Childhood’s End defied even my most aggressive attempts to predict where it would go next. Every time I thought I’d gotten a grasp on Clarke’s story, he pivoted to something altogether unexpected; yet still somehow perfectly reasonable within the construction of this narrative and world. The tightrope walk on display here is truly extraordinary. 

Sitting in O’Hare, I read two chapters in the terminal, and then spent the whole of my two hour flight devouring the rest. A feeling began to well up inside me, and as my eyes passed over the final words of Childhood’s End (several tens of thousands of feet above the Earth) I was overwhelmed by a sense of such longing that few works of fiction have ever been able to elicit. Yet in that longing there was a dissonance. In those final chapters I realized that I never wanted this story to end, but I also understood, with crystal clarity, that this story had to end; and that the certainty of its need for conclusion was as fundamental to the story of Childhood’s End as oxygen is for us to breathe. 

Human beings have a keen knack for failing to see the end of things as ends. Whether we realize it or not, we long for eternity. Things may end, but surely there can never truly be an end to everything, right? It’s the Law of Conservation of Mass: matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form. We look across the universe and see that a nebula cannot be born apart from the death of a star. A creature may die in the woods, but from the decay of its body new life is born in the underbrush: flowers, trees, and mosses. The end of a relationship allows for the creation of new ones. And yet Clarke insists that the story of Childhood’s End must, as the title would indicate, end with irreversible finality.

The story of Childhood’s End spans generations, split across three acts: “Earth and the Overlords”, “The Golden Age”, and “The Last Generation”. “Earth and the Overlords” charts the events surrounding humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrials, and the development of the Earth under their care; “The Golden Age” is, as the name would indicate, about the epoch of pleasure that follows; and “The Last Generation” is…

Childhood’s End is a challenging thing to parse. Much as I tried (unconsciously) to predict how the story would evolve, there were a lot of times where I thought to myself, “Oh, okay, this is what the book is about,” and then Clarke would throw a giant wrench into the works and completely upend my previous understanding of his novel. There is one key development in the third act that really caused me to question what exactly I was supposed to do with this thing. There’s certainly a lot here about self-determination, the idea that human beings inherently want to be the masters of their own destiny, and how we go about manifesting that destiny, even in the smallest of personal victories. Clarke spends a good amount of the narrative speculating on a future in which humanity has had their lives “perfected”. War and poverty are gone, and only leisure and pleasure remain. But in this perfection come myriad kinds of stagnation. 

“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.”

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that in 1953. 

Those of us who tell stories know that conflict is a necessary component of storytelling, because it is in the overcoming of conflict that we give our characters goals to achieve; and though many of us dread conflict in real life, we understand that it is a similar kind of crucible. We learn, we evolve, and we grow because we have conquered these challenges, however big or small they may be. And so, in a world without conflict, how will humanity live? For a while it was the answer to this question to which I thought Clarke was drawing the narrative arc; but then the third act came and… there is certainly a lot of meaning to be pulled from the title: Childhood’s End.

I’m realizing, even as I’m writing this review, that in my self-imposed role as recommender/reviewer/analyst of this novel, I might - in my efforts to craft this review in a timely manner - be rushing to reach some sort of concrete analysis. But I don’t think I need to; and, in fact, I think I shouldn’t. I need time to think about what I have read; and perhaps then, that is what I would like to impart to you: this book demands your time, and your thoughtfulness. Childhood’s End is not a straightforward read. It is a book of dichotomies - a book that is both easy to read and yet hard to understand. Easy to read in terms of how Clarke has tightly structured and developed the narrative, but difficult to fully grasp as a singular whole as he pulls the threads of his story between mystery and revelation; between science and the supernatural; and between the Earth and the cosmos. It is a book that demands you complete it; and then demands you read it again.

And I will definitely be reading it again.