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Childhood's End
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Childhood's End (1953) (edit title/settings)

by Arthur C. Clarke (Author) (edit contributors)

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When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. But, although the Overlords kept themselves hidden from man, they had come to unite a warring world and to offer an end to poverty and crime. When they finally showed themselves it was a shock,... read more

Summary edit see section history

(From Wikipedia)

The humans' arms race is brought to a halt by the sudden appearance of mysterious spaceships above all the Earth's great cities. After a week of silence and increasing tension, the aliens, who become known as the Overlords, announce by world-wide broadcast that they have... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

(From Wikipedia)

The humans' arms race is brought to a halt by the sudden appearance of mysterious spaceships above all the Earth's great cities. After a week of silence and increasing tension, the aliens, who become known as the Overlords, announce by world-wide broadcast that they have benign intentions and desire to help humanity. As enforcers of peace, they bring salvation and life. They also bring the death of some dreams, as humanity is no longer completely independent and may not pursue certain scientific goals, such as space exploration.

The humans remain suspicious, as the Overlords never appear in person. The Overlords' representative, Karellen, does speak with the Secretary General of the United Nations Rikki Stormgren, but is always hidden behind a pane of one way glass. To allay the inevitable suspicions of some, Karellen promises the Overlords will reveal themselves physically in fifty years, after humanity has matured and become comfortable with their presence.

Under the (mild) domination of the Overlords, Mankind enters a golden age of the greatest peace and prosperity ever known, albeit at the expense of some creativity and freedom. Stormgren, with Karellen's help, survives a kidnap attempt by subversive humans suspicious of the Overlords. Stormgren secretly harbors lingering curiosity about the real Overlord nature and smuggles a device aboard Karellen's spaceship to see behind the one-way screen that separates them. Years later he tells a questioning reporter the device failed. The novel strongly hints that the device did indeed capture an image of the Overlords, which Stormgren saw, but that Stormgren agrees with the Overlords: mankind is unready for what that image revealed.

True to their word, fifty years after arrival, the Overlords appear in person. They resemble the traditional human folklore image of demons: bipeds with large wings, horned heads, and tails. The Overlords are larger than humans, their bodies covered with a hard, black armour shell. The Overlords' resemblance to the devil of human folklore is explained as a form of racial memory. The light from Earth's sun is too harsh for them, because their planet's sun has a dimmer redder light, and, though they can breathe Earth's atmosphere, the mix of gases in their own atmosphere is more comfortable. Humankind has, however, grown accustomed to the Overlords by this time and accepts them with open arms and, with their help, creates a Utopian world.

The Overlords begin to pay a discreet interest in the human experience of the occult and psychic research. It is assumed by humans that this is part of their anthropological study of mankind. Rupert Boyce has the best collection of books on the subject in the world and when the Overlords ask to borrow them he refuses, but allows an Overlord called Rashaverak to visit him and study the books. He uses the visit to impress friends and has a party during the Overlords stay. At the party a Ouija board session is conducted, watched by Rashaverak. The answers to questions given by the board are all explicable from knowledge in the minds of the participants except when a young engineer named Jan Rodricks asks the identity of the Overlord's home planet. The boards spells out the number from a star catalog — NGS 549672. One of the participants faints and there is a commotion during which the transcription of this part of the seance disappears. It is revealed that the Overlords suspect this occurrence is the first sign of what is to come.

Jan Rodricks has however memorized the number. He becomes obsessed with finding out if the star number is correct and hatches a plan to stow away on an Overlord spaceship, which he successfully accomplishes.

Although humanity and the Overlords have developed peaceful and even friendly relations by now, the spread of equal goods and the ban on building space ships capable of travelling past the Earth's moon causes some sects to believe their innovation and independence is being suppressed and that culture is becoming stagnant. In response, those sects establish "New Athens", an island colony.

One of the colonists is George Greggson, a theatre designer. His wife Jean was the woman who fainted at the seance. They have two children, Jeffrey and Jennifer Anne. We learn that the Overlords have a special interest in the children and are watching them. This is revealed when Jeffrey's life is saved through Overlord intervention when a tsunami strikes the island.

Some ten years after the Overlords revealed themselves to humanity, human children (starting in New Athens with the Greggson children) begin displaying telepathic and telekinetic abilities and as a result, become estranged from their parents. Karellen then reveals the true purpose of why the Overlords came to Earth. They are in service to the Overmind, a cosmic mind amalgamated from ancient galactic civilizations, freed from the limitations of ordinary matter. The Overlords are not themselves capable of joining the Overmind, but the Overmind has charged them with the duty of fostering humanity's transition to a higher plane of existence and merger with the Overmind. Karellen expresses an envy of humanity; his race is trapped as they are, as they are not now capable of joining the Overmind, though he hopes they will eventually learn how to do so.

Karellen announces that the children with psychic powers will be segregated from the rest of humanity on a continent of their own, and only these children will merge with the Overmind. No more children are born; the narration subtly hints that most of the parents commit suicide, while their children evolve towards merging with the Overmind. New Athens is destroyed by its leaders, by the detonation of a nuclear bomb.

The last man alive is Jan Rodricks, a physicist, who will witness mankind's final evolutionary transformation. He stowed away on an Overlord supply ship earlier in the story in a successful attempt to travel to the Overlord home planet, which he correctly guessed orbits a star of the Carina constellation. As a physicist, Rodricks knows of the relativistic twin paradox effect: the Overlords' ships travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and as a result, the trip to the Overlord planet and back to Earth will only take four months in his subjective, personal time-frame, but the amount of elapsed 'objective' time will be, at minimum, 80 years, or the length of time light would take to make the similar journey, although the actual trip takes much longer. (The Overlord star system – known as NGS 549672 to astronomers on Earth – is forty light-years distant from Earth.)

When Rodricks returns from the Overlord home world, he expects no one on Earth will remember him, nevertheless, he is unprepared for the return: mankind, as he knew it, has died. About three hundred million naked young beings, physically human but otherwise with nothing in common to Man, remain on the quarantined continent. They are the final, physical form of human evolution before merging with the Overmind. Life on their continent — not only human life, but all other forms as well — has been exterminated by them. No normal children have been born and all adults have met their end through despair. The vast cities that Jan remembers are all dark and empty.

Some Overlords remain on Earth, studying the evolved children. It also is revealed here that the Overlords have met and conditioned other races for the Overmind, and that humanity is the fifth race whose apotheosis they have witnessed.

When the evolved children have grown strong enough to mentally alter the Moon's rotation and accomplish other planetary manipulations, it becomes too dangerous to remain and the Overlords prepare to leave. They offer Rodricks the opportunity of leaving with them, but he chooses to remain as witness to Earth's dissolution. Mankind's offspring have evolved to a higher existence, requiring neither a body nor a place, and thus ends mankind's childhood.
The book hints that the Overlords may have been party to Rodricks' return visit to their home planet in order to gain more information through human eyes of the final transformation of humanity. Rodricks reports, via radio, a great burning column of energy/matter ascending from Earth bearing indescribable colours and patterns. As he watches the Earth's gravity begin to decrease, the atmosphere starts escaping to space and material objects seem to dissolve around him. He reports no fear but a sense of accomplishment and completion, and then a blinding flash of light as the Earth evaporates.

The story's last scene details Karellen's final backward look at the Solar System, which becomes no more noticeable among the stars as it recedes than the loss of one small planet in the system. He is emotionally depressed, having seen yet another race evolve to the beyond, while he and his race must remain behind, limited to their current form. Despite that, he renders a final salute to mankind, considering whether or not conditioning them for the Overmind helped his goal of deciphering the evolutionary secret for his race to merge with the Overmind. He then turns away from the view, the reader presumes, to await the Overmind's next order.

Characters/People edit see section history

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “Karellen, he was sure, never made accidental slips: even his indiscretions were calculated to many decimal places.”
  • “The stars are not for man.”
  • “The world's now cold, featureless, and culturally dead; nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came ... there's nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments.”

Organizations edit see section history

  • Freedom League: A religiously based group that opposes Earth's domination by the Overlords.

First Sentence edit see section history

The volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific had been sleeping now for half a million years.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

  • Knowledge, Technology and Power: In much of his fiction, Arthur C. Clarke supports the idea that knowledge, particularly knowledge of technology, equals power—and not just physical power, but psychological power as well. One of Clarke's three "Laws" is the idea that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In Childhood's End, the Overlords use their technology to achieve both these ends. The vast technological superiority of the Overlords apparently knows no bounds. They can spy on anything that happens on the surface; they can project artificial copies of their ships so convincing that they even make a sound as they enter the atmosphere; they can inflict pain without causing a wound; they can block out the sun over specific geographic areas; and they can alter a planet's gravity, to list just a few of their powers. They also have the Stardrive, which lets them fly their ships at the speed of light.On Earth, the Overlords use this technological power to exert benevolent but totalitarian rule. They create a utopia on Earth through what Karellen calls a "correct use of power." "Correct" in his idea means "efficient"; rather than destroying a rebellious country, Karellen destroys its power by driving its leaders mad, or with a simple—but harmless—show of power, such as blotting out the sun. But Karellen's use of the term "correct" does not include a value judgment on whether the action being taken is the "right" one. Stormgren's objection to this claim is that it sounds like "might makes right," to which Karellen replies with his argument about efficient and inefficient uses of power. Karellen does not address Stormgren's true objection: that regardless of how efficient the Overlords' use of their "might" is, they are still determining what is "right." As the existence of groups such as the Freedom League reveals, not everyone on Earth believes that the Overlords' efforts to create a utopia are what is right for humanity.Of course, another aspect of this theme is the limitations of technology. In Childhood's End, knowledge and technology is a dead-end. The Overlords have mastered technology, but they are unable to make the transcendental leap to the next stage, that of the Overmind. This idea is unique among most of Clarke's works, which generally espouse the idea that knowledge and technology represents the future of mankind. In order for it to surpass technology, Clarke is forced to make the Overmind a vague, mystical, and perhaps even mythological entity.
  • The Problems of Utopian Society: While the main concepts of Childhood's End revolve around the irony of the Overlords as benevolent masters that look like "devils" and the division between technological and evolutionary achievement, the book also deals heavily with the possible problems of a utopian society. Before we are even aware that the Overlords have started making beneficial changes to the Earth's economic and political systems, we are introduced to the Freedom League, composed of humans who object to the Overlords' meddling in human affairs. The Freedom League does not object to the policies of the Overlords, it objects to the Overlords' very presence. To a degree, Wainwright is correct; the Overlords remove all of humanity's dreams, goals, aspirations, and struggles. In eliminating conflict, the Overlords put humans in a position where they have only once choice: begin educating themselves and exploring, or decline into stagnation. Since the Overlords refuse to allow mankind to enter space, there is no choice but stagnation. For a time, people attempt to fight off boredom through education and entertainment. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, people like Jan Rodricks became restless. As the narrator notes, "no utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone." As a utopia progresses, the more dissatisfied or degraded its people will become. Boredom will give way to violence and moral depravity. This often happens whenever things are going well for a large number of people and often represents the self-destructive downfall of many a government.Moral depravity is not the only problem that utopias eventually face. There is also the problem of artistic stagnation, which is addressed in the novel by the creation of New Athens. Without discontentment, without strife or struggle, artistry will necessarily suffer. As more people have more leisure time, there is more art, and thus humanity begins to drown in so much art that there is no clear way of determining "good" from "bad." The New Athens colony was doomed from the start; it was merely an attempt to create a utopia within a utopia.But aside from addressing the practical—and perhaps rather obvious—problems of utopian society, Childhood's End also presents a rather problematic situation. Evolution works primarily by isolating those more fit to survive; the weak die, leaving the strong and the adaptable. But as the standard of living is raised across the globe, as even the lazy are allowed to live out their lives with the basic necessities, there is none of this weeding out process going on. Therefore, when the children begin their strange transformation into the Overmind, the process cannot be considered "evolution." In order for it to be considered so, one must alter the definition of "adversity": in the face of utopian stagnation, the children must mutate into the Overmind in order to fight off their complete degradation into animals.
  • The Purpose of Humanity: Several of Clarke's novels tackle the big questions of the meaning of human existence. Much like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End tries to find a purpose for humanity by putting it against a backdrop of alien intelligence. Clarke has often said that he believes humanity is meant to reach out into space and explore the stars. However, in Childhood's End, most of the characters—particularly the Overlords and Jan Rodricks—agree that "the stars are not for man."What, then, is the purpose of human existence? According to Karellen, all of human development leads up to the moment when the children of the last generation join the Overmind. The Overmind, then, becomes an end—and a meaning—unto itself. But what are the motives of the Overmind? Karellen and the Overlords only have a theory that that Overmind is trying to increase its "awareness of the universe." Whatever the Overmind's plans, it seems difficult to equate its purposes with that of mankind. In the novel, the purpose of mankind is only to develop to the point at which it can join the collective conscious of the Overmind. As Karellen says when he announces the transformation of the children, "All the hopes and dreams of your race are ended now." To a student of Clarke's fiction, there cannot be a darker or more blasphemous pronouncement. Humanity's scientific and technological progress, its curiosity and efforts at bettering itself, have been halted by a mystical, almost supernatural energy force called the Overmind. Despite Karellen's claims that the Overmind is something "wonderful," it seems like cold comfort to know that your children will live on, without individuality or personality, within a being of pure energy and thought.
  • Deception: Deception is rampant in Childhood's End. Deception is a trick of knowledge; the less you are deceived, and the better you are at deceiving others, the more powerful you are. The best deceivers are, of course, the Overlords, who deceive mankind on dozens of different points. Karellen deceives Stormgren by hiding behind a piece of one-way glass and calling it a "viewscreen" and by planting a tracking device on Stormgren. Stormgren, for his part, sneaks a scanner into Karellen's room and then tries to use a flashlight to see through the glass. Karellen has the greater power, of course, because he is aware of both of Stormgren's deceptions, just as he is (almost certainly) aware of Jan Rodricks's plan to sneak aboard an Overlord vessel many years later.The Overlords deceive humanity from the start, never revealing their intentions until the children of the last generation begin to mutate into the Overmind. The Overlords visit New Athens under the pretence of inspecting the island, when actually they just want to check up on Jeffrey. Stormgren's kidnappers try their hardest to trick the Overlords. Jan does his best to deceive the Overlords when he sneaks on to their ship. Deception is a major tool of intellectual control, and though the Overlords are the masters of it, it is the primary weapon of both humans and Overlords throughout the novel.
  • Christian Imagery and Folklore: As frequently discussed elsewhere in the summary analyses, Childhood's End often seems like an allegorical tale, a morality play set on a science fiction stage. The play features the arrival of the Antichrist, or Satan (the Overlords), the end of humanity (as it dies out after the Overlords' announcement of the coming of the Overmind), and an Armageddon and assumption of the "faithful" into "Heaven" (as the children of the last generation join the Overmind, destroying the Earth in the process). Considering its unique and transcendental nature, when compared to the rest of Clarke's works, it seems entirely reasonable to look at Childhood's End as a thinly-veiled fable with some significant social commentary (particularly about the nature of utopias), rather than a work of serious science fiction.
  • Collective Consciousness: Part of the description of the Overmind is that it is a kind of "collective conscious," a being of thought and energy composed of the minds of millions or billions (even trillions?) of other beings, all working as a single entity. As a race, all humans—even those thousands of years before the children of the last generation—have had some latent abilities of this sort. This is what provides the explanation for why the Overlords look so similar to a Christian image of the Devil: humans, as a collective, had a premonition of their ultimate end, and they feared that end. Therefore, they made the participants of that end, the demons, into an object of fear and evil. This collective consciousness also appears in specific people such as Jean and Jan, who often have slight premonitions before major events occur.
  • The Overlords: As mentioned above, the Overlords can be seen as ironic symbols of the Devil. In an unexpected, but equally effective way, the Overlords bring about the end of humanity just as the Devil was predicted he would. Whereas the Devil, or the Antichrist, would have brought about much death and destruction before the final end, the Overlords bring about peace and prosperity, albeit for less than a century. In the end, humanity does degrade into violence and death, just as predicted in Revelations; and the shepherds of this end are the Overlords. Whether they are "evil" or not is a matter of perspective; they do the bidding of the Overmind and play a part in the end of humanity and the destruction of Earth.
  • New Athens: New Athens is symbolic of the inevitable decay of a utopian society and the uselessness of peacefully attempting to combat those problems. For all its hopes of artistic achievement, the New Athens colony is ultimately impotent. Without struggle, without anger, righteous indignation, rage, or hate, artists have no fuel with which to produce great works. New Athens, in its false attempts to create minor inconveniences in life (such as using kitchens and bicycles), tries to create a utopia within a utopia. New Athens is a symbol of the broader utopia of Earth around it. Both are doomed to failure through degradation.
  • The Overmind: If the Overlords represent the Devil, then the Overmind is the closest thing there is to God. Certainly, the way in which the children of the last generation are incorporated into the Overmind is reminiscent of Christian descriptions of the Rapture, when the souls of the faithful are called into the Divine Presence, there to remain for eternity as part of the Holy Trinity. But, in theory, the Overmind is a thing of science; it should be capable of being studied, understood, and perhaps even destroyed. By placing the Overmind in a science fiction novel, there are certain constraints on how far a symbolic or allegorical comparison can be taken. Ultimately, the reader must accept the idea that, as transcendental as it seems to be, the Overmind is just another alien.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 49 of 99 in National Public Radio's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy. (authoritative list)
This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 6 of 10 in Science Fiction Masterworks Hardcover Series. (publisher edition list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Arthur C. Clarke (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Country: United Kingdom
Publication Date: 1953
ISBN: 0345347951
Page Count: 214

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PZ3.C551205 Ch
  • Dewey: 813

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
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