Arthur C. Clarke. Childhood’s End. New York: Harcourt, 1962. Print.

After reading From Narnia to a Space Odyssey, it behooved me to read Childhood’s End. Lewis mentions it in his essay “On Science Fiction,” and it is the book that established Clarke’s reputation.

The problem with reviewing this book is that there are numerous plot twists, and I do not want to write a spoiler.

Perhaps the best way to describe the first two-thirds of Childhood’s End is as a cross between “Voyage to Laputa” in Gulliver’s Travels and Brave New World.

A large spaceship, or perhaps fleet of spaceships (the tale is ambiguous on this), arrives on earth. The ship does not land but rather hovers over the earth the way the island of Laputa hovers over Balnibarbi in Gulliver’s Travels. These extraterrestrials impose a kind of Pax Romana over the whole earth. If men start a war, disrupt the environment, or commit a crime, the space ships immediately cause some kind of harm to the perpetrators or their region just as Laputa blocks the sun and rain from a rebellious town in Balnibarbi. These extraterrestrials, called Overlords by the earthlings, sometimes hinder the sun’s rays over an area causing a quick repentance.

The Overlords stay for a hundred years and their oversight creates a kind of utopia. Earth has peace. Crime is nearly nonexistent. It appears that humankind has achieved its humanistic potential.

Of course, this order is imposed in a peaceable, but nevertheless secretive and authoritarian manner. For example, no Overlord is seen by earth men for the first fifty years of the occupation. The family is weakened as in Brave New World by legal acceptance of extramarital sex and having marriage as a mere contract for a limited number of years. After the contract date is up, the contract can be renewed or, more frequently, the spouses are free to pair up with others. A ten-year contract is considered unusually long, though romantic in the thought behind it.

According to Huxley expert David Bradshaw of Oxford, Aldous Huxley was fascinated with planned societies, as were many intellectuals during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Huxley thought both Communism and Nazism had potential for creating a just society. So his Brave New World describes an amoral communal society (like Communism) based on genetics (like Nazism) and run by scientific planners (like both). After the Hitler-Stalin Pact and World War II, Huxley changed his perspective so that his 1946 introduction to Brave New World presents the novel as a dystopia—somewhat different from his original purpose when the book came out in 1932.

Like Huxley’s novel, Clarke’s Overlord utopia is presented as “scientific.” Mankind, thanks to the long-lived aliens, is able to live at peace. Though Clarke presents this positively, like Huxley he notes some shortcomings:

The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments…do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels?…No wonder people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating.

Cable TV anyone?

There is a group of “alternative” people that the Overlords, who appear to be benevolent elitists, permit—the island community of New Athens. Just as ancient Athens was the only state not conquered by the Dorians and so preserved the stories and myths of the Mycenaean culture and kept the arts and learning alive in the region—the island of New Athens is meant to be a place for people to be creative in both the arts and sciences. Indeed, it sounds like Clarke here was influenced by Kitto’s The Greeks, especially his chapter “The Polis.”

There is a lot more to the story, but I am reluctant to share it without giving too much away. There are some characters we do become interested in; even some of the Overlords are portrayed sympathetically. One character does resemble Gulliver. But this book is ultimately no Brave New World. The utopia, or the dystopia, whichever you believe it is, does not last.

There is a reason Clarke called the story Childhood’s End. It ultimately is neither utopian nor dystopian. It is apocalyptic. Just as Clarke’s “Jupiter Five” may have inspired Richard Dawkins with his evolutionary theories, Childhood’s End may have inspired Stephen Jay Gould’s with his. At least Clarke was honest in calling his work fiction.