Review: Childhood's End
What starts off as a prelude to the space race between the cold war powers, and man’s eventual journey to the stars, is put on hold by the arrival of a fleet of alien starships, which, quite peacefully assume the role of dictators to earth. Doesn’t hurt that they can shrug off nuclear blasts like a champ, or that they have deep space devices which can blot out sunlight from reaching the earth, and thus can potentially hold the whole planet hostage.
So, after token resistance, a lot of grumbling and a failed attempt at resistance, the new world order of a unified earth is formed under what the press have dubbed as ‘Overlords’; though the aliens themselves preferred to be called ‘supervisors’. A golden age of humanity ensues, with no war, disease, higher standard of living, advanced technologies connecting all parts of the globe and making colonization of even the most remote locations possible with relative ease. Humanity has entered an age of Utopia; the catch, they can be as free as they want, on earth. Space travel is taboo.
But utopia comes with its shortcomings. Humanity has lost the drive to explore and discover. When all basic necessities of life, and furthermore can be obtained with little to no effort, is there any need to venture into unknown, unchartered territories or discover new unstable technologies?
“Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.”
But while not malicious, and not interfering with most human affairs as they might be, the Overlord agenda is somewhat more esoteric, and humanity upliftment might not be what they actually have in mind. This is the premise of the story.
While reading Clarke, one thing which stood out to me was the lack of jargon. There are some here and there, but most of the concepts in this book can be understood with a high school level understanding of science. For some bizarre reason, when I started reading it, I mistook it for a novel by Asimov. Here I was thinking ‘hey this is pretty relatable, and simple to understand, so Asimov can write without boring the regular audience if he tries’ and then reality dawned. That, I guess is what made Clarke’s works like ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ more accessible to the reader in me. Although ‘The Foundation Trilogy’ is my all time favorite sci-fi novel, go figure.
As mentioned, one key troupe of the book is scaling. There is always a bigger fish. To humanity, the science and space capabilities of the Overlords might be indistinguishable from magic; but to them, the Galaxy is a vast place with them merely being one of the lower tier sentience. None more so than this is made clear when we encounter the Overmind.
It seems to be a running theme in literary circles, especially those which deal with Sci-Fi, to explore the ‘humanity is part of a collective whole’. Childhood’s End, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Grant Morrison’s ‘The Invisibles’ to name a few. But Clarke does it in a poetic, yet nihilistic way.
Towards the end of the story, the last human being on earth muses
“The world was his. Everything he needed-all the material possessions anyone could ever desire-were his for the taking. But he was no longer interested. He feared neither the loneliness of the deserted planet, nor the presence that still rested here in the last moments before it went to seek its unknown heritage. In the inconceivable backwash of that departure, Jan did not expect that he and his problems would long survive.”
In the Clarke galaxy, sentient life has only two paths, opposite in crossroads. Either like humanity with its latent psychic potential, ascend into an awakened state of existence, sacrifice all emotions and individuality; to gain near omniscience and the chance to assimilate and unite with the Overmind.
Or, like the Overmind, be rejected as psychic nulls, and despite all their immense space-time harnessing capabilities, forever be confined to a singular plane of existence, in an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
In this black and white space, there is no place for human dreams, worries and aspirations. Worse, despite what we may strive for, the universe will keep progressing. Like the overlord Karellen told humanity, in no uncertain terms.
“In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. […] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.”
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