panguitch's Full Review: Arthur Charles Clarke - Childhood's End
Note: Attentive readers will find vague spoilers in this review.
Atheist ex Machina
Much of Arthur C. Clarke's work follows the same basic plotline, and Childhood's End (1953) sets the first precedent: First, something happens that forces humanity to rethink every assumption it has about the universe and its place in it. Second, detailed and rigorous attention is given to this change and how people come to terms with it. Finally, rigor flies out the window as weird metaphysics swoops in like an atheist's deus ex machina.
Childhood's End opens with the Soviet/American space race (the "good old days" for science fiction). But before either side can get its rockets off the ground they're trumped by the arrival of the Overlords, seemingly all-powerful aliens whose saucers dominate the skies and who benevolently take humanity under their wing.
The Overlords end the arms race. They end all wars. They even put a stop to animal cruelty. Peace on Earth is a pretty sweet deal and it doesn't take long for humanity to get comfortable. But there are some malcontents who resent being dictated to by aliens, or who fear their creativity is being stifled, or who feel cheated of their opportunity to explore space on their own terms.
And the serpent said unto the woman . . .
This first portion of the book is quite entertaining, with Rikki Stormgren, the Secretary General of the UN, caught between the restless minority among humankind and the firm but magnanimous Overlords, who refuse to appear in person. Stormgren himself is curious about the Overlords' physical appearance, but they fear the sight would shatter humanity's fragile worldview and insist on waiting fifty years before revealing themselves.
By that time the shock (and I'll try not to spoil it) is quietly absorbed by an increasingly complacent Earth. But for the reader there's a great scramble to reassess humanity's creation myths, which may have been seeded by previous Overlord visits. Although I've had more than my fill of Aliens-in-the-Bible type hogwash, I enjoyed Clarke's approach, primarily for its light-handedness.
Science Fiction, Future Science
It's always interesting to look back at the predictions made in classic science fiction. For example, Clarke suggests that the "Puritan aberration" of sexual mores would be shattered by two inventions: a reliable oral contraceptive and a method "as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood--of identifying the father of any child." These technologies were realized soon after Clarke's writing, but our moral codes have proven resistant to his reductionism.
Later in the book a group of nostalgic free-thinkers found a sort of artists' colony hoping to foster the innovation that has languished under the Overlords' rule. In a criticism of the TV-viewing habits of placid consumerist society one complains that "the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day." A bold prediction for 1953, when TV was still a novelty. Fifty years later it's proved eerily prescient, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting in the American Time Use Survey that the average American spends 2.6 hours per day watching TV (http://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/ch9.gif).
Post-Theological Teleology
The idea that peace and prosperity stifle creativity is intriguing, but Clarke doesn't go far with it. Instead the Overlords take up an interest in the paranormal and the book rapidly descends into squishy speculations about the transcendence of intelligence over matter and humanity's ultimate destiny, which is apparently an SF version of Nirvana: extinction and assimilation into an egoless galactic consciousness. Countless Star Trek episodes have since drained any freshness from the concept of disembodied super-minds, but this kind of soupy metaphysics continues to be a popular theme in science fiction. I don't know if it started with Childhood's End, but in this iteration I find it tiresome, the mewling of a mind which has disdained religion and now casts about for some new hope of transcendence.
To Clarke's credit, the characters here are more well-rounded than is usual in his stories, and the writing is blessedly succinct. But, as with 2001: A Space Odyssey, I checked out when the wild mysticism took over. Still, there's meat to chew on here, a sustenance that the hollow Rendezvous with Rama lacks.
Without warning, giant silver ships from deep space appear in the skies above every major city on Earth. Manned by the Overlords, in fifty years, they...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Written in the early 1950s, this acclaimed novel of The Overlords and their reign on Earth established Clarke as a master science fiction writer.More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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