★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Childhood’s End
• Author: Arthur C. Clarke
• Year: 1953 (mine was 1990 mass market paperback)
• Pages: 212
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Ballantine Books*
• ISBN 0-345-34795-1 (paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* Publisher is also listed as Del Rey, and Random House)

 

Summary

Like the previous Clarke novel I reviewed (here), Childhood’s End began as a short story (Earth And The Overlords) before the author filled it out into a novel. This one, though, is widely regarded by readers and critics as Clarke’s best novel. The version I picked up at a library sale is from 1990 — for which Clarke added a foreword and rewrote the first chapter. (The 1953 version, obviously written before the U.S.-USSR space race, correctly predicted that race but Clarke felt it needed updating as the 20th Century drew to a close.) I am not a fan of the new first chapter.

The book is divided into three sections (“Earth And The Overlords”, “The Golden Age”, and “The Last Generation” — the third might be a spoiler), and Clarke switches easily from one character’s perspective to another as the story moves along — there isn’t a single primary character. An advanced extra-terrestrial species referred to as “Overlords” arrives in massive ships above Earth; with a few subtle, casual displays of awesome, unimaginable power, they demonstrate their undeniable superiority, but mostly leave Earthlings to their own devices. As decades pass, the worst of terrestrial society fades away — wars and religions become pointless, technology and education advance, but all humanity awaits the endgame of the Overlords...

 

Commentary

This novel is far superior to The Songs Of Distant Earth, though I could tell by the style that it was written by the same person. Here, the plot moves forward steadily and the reader learns of the big surprises at the same time as the characters. The story is epic in scope yet Clarke masterfully delivers it in barely more than 200 pages.

There aren’t many quotable passages, due to Clarke’s often oblique prose, but a few did stand out, like this one:

“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.”

—page 49

 

How Painfully Dated Can A 1953 Novel Be?

Many older sci-fi novels quickly date themselves — computers fed by “tape” or clunky communication devices — while the reader smirks and fondles the smartphone in his pocket. But obsolete technology isn’t the only kind of dating to be found.

Here, in Childhood’s End, Clarke is impressively farseeing as he describes a mixed marriage between Rupert Boyce and Maia, who is “one quarter Negro”, and in the fact that one of his many main characters is Maia’s brother Jan. Their mother “was coal black” but born in Scotland, while their blonde father had spent most of his life in Haiti. In these and other descriptions, Clarke displays the hope that future humanity will focus less on arbitrary divisions. He also provides more speaking roles to women than was the norm for 1950s science fiction.

However, he often uses “girls” to refer to full-grown, adult women — even an extra-terrestrial character uses the term. Most, if not all, leadership roles in his imagined future are held by men. When a couple moves into an “old-fashioned” home, it is assumed that the woman will take up the extra slack of housework. When one character — a woman — faints, there is a whole paragraph about how women are always fainting, darn them.

I realize some of these anti-woman tropes were common at the time — my point here is to show that what dates this novel isn’t necessarily the old technology but social attitudes.

Something else is Clarke’s absolutely hilarious miscalculation about what would happen to television in the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries. Here is one character complaining about the entertainment industry:

“The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertrainments. 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. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!”

—page 135

It’s hilarious because “five hundred hours” per day works out to only 21 channels. In real life here in 2019, we have thousands of TV channels (more than 3,000 in China alone), which doesn’t take into account content-distributors like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube, and others. And the “three hours a day” is hilarious because recent studies show (at least in the U.S.) we’re actually watching seven hours per day. (Even in the 1950s, we were averaging four hours a day, according to the same source.)

I didn’t take off a point for any of this. It’s part of the charm of very old science fiction, and you learn to take the gems of accurate prediction when you can find them.

One other item that shows the age of the book is the presence of “paranormal” phenomena — which take greater precedence as the story rolls on. Despite his investigative, scientific mind, Clarke was fooled in his early years by many claims — all of which later turned out to be fraudulent, or at best, unsubstantiated. He wasn’t including these phenomena necessarily because it was a fun addition to the story, but because he believed they might be real. Later in life, he became much more skeptical of these claims and his later novels avoid delving into the topic.

 

Points Off For...

Clarke’s writing style is frustrating. Often, he has trouble saying what he wants to say. Whether he is intentionally obscuring matters or merely isn’t able to clearly express himself, I’m not certain. For example, when describing Professor Sullivan’s construction of a life-size model of a whale fighting a giant squid, here is how Clarke puts it:

“...[H]e looked upon his handiwork. He was proud of what he had done: it seemed a pity that it would soon be banished forever from human sight. The tableau might have been the work of some mad artist in a drugged delirium. Yet it was a paintstaking copy from life: Nature herself was the artist here. The scene was one that, until the perfection of underwater television, few men had ever glimpsed — and even then only for seconds on those rare occasions when the giant antagonists thrashed their way to the surface. These battles were fought in the endless night of the ocean depths, where the sperm whales hunted for their food. It was food that objected strongly to being eaten alive...”

—page 121

It’s not until the following paragraph that the reader learns that the “food” is a giant squid. I suppose many readers enjoy this type of lead-in to a description, but I strongly prefer clear and immediate descriptions — especially when any character in the story would immediately recognize what she’s seeing. Use “whale” and “squid” in the first sentence. Then tell me all those other thoughts.

Conclusion

Any science fiction fan who hasn’t read this novel probably should. I read it again because I admitted to myself that I didn’t have a clear memory of reading it the first time (probably more than 20 years ago), and it was worth it. I also appreciate that I read it directly after reading The Songs Of Distant Earth, because the contrats are remarkable. Instead of simply mentioning the “Big Ideas” as part of a boring, plotless story, here Clarke weaves them into a poignant narrative with an impending end point. Here, the plot is never lost, the character development isn’t taken for granted, and the whole situation is described as well as such a huge “what if” can be described.

 

 

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