This is a classic of science fiction??!? Wow our standards used to be low! This is pretty bad.
Because of the age of the novel and my disdain for its contents I am going to liberally spoil this book, so skip reading now if you don’t want that.
The premise is a common one in science fiction. Aliens come to Earth and take over, in the process solving every one of man’s problems, turning Earth into a Utopia. That would all be fine if any bit of it were interesting. But it’s not.
Problem: The aliens never tell the humans why they are doing anything. But never does the reason turn out to make any sense whatsoever. They hide themselves for the first 50 years because they resemble devils?
Problem: The aliens control earth by passing messages to the U.N. Supposedly the big gains come from them removing man’s need to war with each other. All that extra productivity turns into a classless society. All the aliens do besides rendering weapons inoperative is to send teletypes to the U.N. for them to implement. And somehow from this we’re supposed to get nirvana? Puh-lease.
The first third of the book is all about the U.N. Secretary-General. Some sort of plot to kidnap him which will bring everything down, except the Overlords save him. And then he hatches his own elaborate plot to find out what the aliens look like, and succeeds. But Clarke doesn’t tell us what he finds. Nope. Clarke just jumps into the next section, where 50 years later the aliens reveal themselves. So what exactly was the point of the plot for that first part?
Part two is all about a seance. We’re in the era of unlimited science, and paranormal phenomena are considered scientific? One of the participants in the seance uses the information there to learn where the Overlords home world is. Why it’s a secret is never explained satisfactorily. Now our intrepid astronomer Jan decides to stow away in cargo back to the home world. Not quite as pointless as that first part (it ties in at the end) but nearly as pointless.
Then humanity turns into one magnificent hive-mind blob. Supposedly the Overlord’s rule is designed to prepare for this so we’re ready. The explanation of the reasoning for this is incomprehensible. We’d make a bad hive mind if they didn’t drag us by our ears into the hive mind age, or some such hooey. And we follow the first family to have hive mind children, for what reason I don’t know. Because right after they are revealed to be hive minds, Clarke drops the characters.
Speaking of characters, none of them are. They are all bland suburban types of the card-board cutout of the worst variety sort. They could be robots for all they seemed to care about anything and their dialog was certainly stilted enough.
Highly unrecommended.
Title: Childhood’s end
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 222 p.
Publication date: October 1975
ISBN-10: 0-345-24344-7
LC classification: PZ3.C551205 Ch
