Childhood's End

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Childhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke

Fantasy & Science Fiction

Aug 8, 2018

The decade of Childhood’s End’s publication was rife with tales of alien invasions and “first contact,” especially in lowbrow cinema, as films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), and This Island Earth (1955) attest. Clarke’s novel fits neatly into that subgenre, but uses the familiar tropes freshly and with maximum sophistication, yoking them to the then cutting-edge, and soon to be popular, mystical speculations of the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin about the ultimate fate of consciousness. Childhood’s End—like Clarke’s subsequent work, The City and the Stars (and 2001 as well)—exudes a rich and almost gnostic sense of loss at the same time as it conjures the breathtaking possibility of a new, if unfathomable, unfolding of reality. For a thinker who radiated an engineer’s practicality (he forecasted orbital satellites and their uses before any such things existed), Clarke also harbored a poet’s soul, giving him perhaps the perfect apparatus for crafting science fiction that reveled in a melancholy hope, both thrilling and perilous.

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