Book Review: Childhood’s End

Posted on

by Jamie

Childhood's End

Note: This is book #21 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

When science fiction great Arthur C. Clark died a few weeks ago I was moved to pick up something by him to mark the passage. Since I’ve read his Space Odyssey books already, I grabbed a small, lesser known work by the name of Childhood’s End. Stuffed with themes like humanity’s place in the universe, the nature of utopia, the impact of first contact on society, and the potential for human achievement, it’s definitely classic sci-fi. I just wish Clark had expanded a lot of these themes and built out a complete story instead of something that seems like it can’t decide if it should be a short story or a novel.

The basic gist is this: one day Earth is visited by inconceivably powerful aliens, who dub themselves our benevolent overlords and supervisors. These aliens refuse to show their faces or communicate directly with most of humanity, but besides enforcing a few strict rules designed to make us play nice with each other, they mostly leave us alone and stick to their massive hovering spaceships. After a generation has passed, humans grow used to the overlords, but thanks to the utopia that their presence fosters and some of the technology that they share, the human race has gotten compliant and lax in the drive for achievement that had characterized it in the time preceding the arrival of its interstellar houseguests. Then the overlords decide to reveal themselves and it’s really impossible to discuss anything beyond that without spoilers.

There are some interesting ideas here, but as I hinted at earlier it feels like Clarke isn’t exploring them very deeply. The whole idea of how humanity reacts and adapts to the overlords rule is largely glossed over, even though that kind of thing would probably tell us a lot about ourselves. So too is the aftermath of the massively important events at the end of the book largely ignored, even though it was ripe for the writing. In general, I feel like Clarke had some cool ideas here, but didn’t really follow them through. Too bad, because there was a lot of potential.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

Published by

Jamie