Childhood's End (1953)

This was written in 1953, but feels like it could have been written this year -- which shows how timeless Clarkes style of science fiction is. The story is familiar if you've watched the movie Independence Day. But what happens if the aliens seem inteligent and malevolent? How long does it take for humans to accept aliens? This relatively short novel was beat out for Retro Hugo Award by Fahrenheit 451. ( )

I never know what to think about Clarke - he writes really influential books that tackle a lot of big ideas, but if I were to sit down and try to write one of those high school English-type essays, like "the exploration of human evolution in Clarke's works", I don't know what I would say. Yes, Clarke deals with the theme of humanity and its place in the cosmic and terrestrial pecking orders, but every time I finish one of his books I never know if he's actually brought anything new to the table or just checked off a box, like "yup, this book certainly does involve humans turning into space babies or telepathic child mutants!" Now, maybe my reaction is missing the point - since it's as impossible for a human writer to really depict a truly advanced post-human or alien race as it is for a dog to write a Shakespeare play (let's assume this dog can use a computer, okay?), Clarke ending all of his books with some variation of "... and the regular humans pondered the alien artifacts/alien spaceships/alien civilization and didn't really know what to say" is just him doing the only thing he can do. The way that humans react to things they don't understand - i.e. the vast majority of the universe - can be just as interesting as the way they react to things they do understand, and Clarke is justly famous for the way that he fills in his stories of humanity coping with the inexplicable with realistic characters and interesting conflicts - Dave Bowman's struggles with HAL 9000 on the mission to investigate the monoliths in 2001 are as close to immortal as science fiction gets when it comes to literature.

But when I compare Clarke's treatment of man vs. alien to that of someone like Stanislaw Lem, I feel like Clarke is somewhat wanting - humanity spends all of Childhood's End not knowing what the aliens are really like or what the heck their plans are or why their evolution will be good at all (and it even happens off-screen, a fait accompli by the time the lone normal human returns from a pointless voyage to the alien homeworld), and so the book ends on a big question mark, without anyone really learning anything or conveying much more than confusion to the reader. Which I guess is fair enough, and maybe my reaction also says more about my expectations of what these kinds of stories should be like than it does about the stories themselves - Lem is a much more "literary" writer who would rather write a thinly veiled essay than create ensemble casts of realistic human beings. Clarke obviously has his strengths there. But I don't get the sense of philosophical richness and sociological investigation that Lem provides when he tackles the same theme, and maybe that's just part of the inevitable tradeoff between "telling a story" and "showing a story".

Case in point: in an effort to provide human life with some meaning after the contact, a group builds a utopian community on an island dedicated to the good life. When I read that part, I was immediately reminded of the ideal society in Plato's Republic, and was expecting some similar kind of treatise, but he didn't really give much analysis of the society beyond just stating its purpose. I thought there was a big missed opportunity to explore more of how people have to create their own meanings when all needs are taken care of by an alien power, or on how people would relate to each other when all the traditional ways of asserting power and dominance and relative status were obsolete. So that was a letdown. In fairness to Clarke, though, he was much better at dealing with aliens than Isaac Asimov, whose most famous works always took place in a universe empty of everything non-human. Maybe it's also a generational difference, Clarke having written his works a full literary generation ahead of Lem. Either way, Childhood's End was a very ambiguous book for me, entertaining but unsatisfying too. Its title inspired a cool Pink Floyd song though! ( )

I loved this book and may have to add it to my favorites. If you like studies in consciousness and alien contact, this is for you. There's a clever twist about human bias and preconceptions. I believe anyone who starts thinking hard about time and how it works is probably an experiencer. My guess is A.C. Clarke was an experiencer. Metaphysical and consciousness experiences cause the recipient to search for explanations. ( )

One of the coldest, most heart-breaking and yet most beautiful books I have ever read. ( )

Utopian classic.

Some books you read and re-read all of your life, this probably will not be one of them. While breathtaking when it was published, the book reads a bit like Casablanca screens- full of too many cliches and worn out tropes. Very strong opening with the good guys having the kind of ominous overtones that any good fairy tale has. The last third suffers even though it follows logically from the first parts. Or perhaps that's why it suffers.
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