Childhood’s End

"Childhood’s End is Clarke’s best book by a long way. Alien “overlords” land on Earth and impose – by force – a benign and workable utopia. That sounds like a whole story there, but that’s only the start of Clarke’s compact, evocative novel. Humanity lives through five decades of a golden age, but then the reason behind the overlords’ appearance becomes clear. I don’t want to say too much about this, because I don’t want to spoil the beautifully paced and judged series of reveals that Clarke orchestrates – except to say that the ending strikes me as among the purest sense of wonder that SF has achieved, and that it has to do with children. But we might guess that from the title – that mankind’s “childhood” will end over the course of the narrative. It is what happens to the children of the main characters in the final sections of the novel that constitute the novel’s most powerful element, moving and disturbing in equal measure. In fact, several critics have noted how the late 1940s and 50s saw a plethora of SF stories that dramatise human children in league with aliens or as aliens themselves. Something, we might say, was working itself out in the speculative culture of the immediately postwar years – some widespread cultural anxiety about the nature and status of children. An apprehension of the uncanny aspect of the child. Near the end of Clarke’s novel a human character, George Greggson, learns from an overlord called Rashaverak the true nature of the world’s young generation: “The colour drained from his face. ‘You mean?…’ he gasped … ’then in God’s name what are my children?’” That question has resonance precisely because it catches actual parental fear, and embodies the uncanny and alien nature of any child. The love a parent feels for his or her child may provoke its own intense jouissance , but that jouissance also mediates the horror. Your child will outlive you, her life is your death. Which is entirely the way it ought to be – if it were any other way it would be tragically unbearable – but which also necessarily confronts you with your own mortality. Moreover, your child is you in one sense, but in another is quite other than you. An alien and estranged creature, a being whose delight excludes you. Something similar happens with the starchild of the last frames of Clarke-Kubrick’s 2001 . In that movie, what is most uncanny is not the appearance of the starchild itself but rather the scenes that immediately precede it – [the astronaut] Bowman stranded in some Louis XV drawing room at the other end of a cosmic wormhole, haunted by himself and ageing visibly before our very eyes. In other words, the uncanny thing – the newness of the starchild and the change, perhaps destruction, it forebodes to the Earth – is transferred in inverted form onto Bowman, the “parent”. It is his accelerated ageing that is the spooky thing, because it reinforces the trajectory towards death and the supercession that is implied by the figure of the starchild in the first place."