Childhood' End, by Athur C. Clarke

Originally reviewed on Arpil 19, 2024.

A copy of Childhood's End. It shows a child's face in blue, one eye obscured by a circle that has a demonic red eye in it.

An alien invasion story, but this time the aliens are benevolent and force humanity to be good. No more war, discrimination, animal cruelty, etc. The narrative is full of mystery. What do the Overlords look like? What do they want? Where do they come from?

When one question is answers, more questions are revealed. I slowly grew more and more disappointed as the plot shifted away from the initial things I was seeking.

The characterization was quite weak, all of the characters felt like items that moved the plot forward rather than characters themselves. I personally prefer characters that feel like people, but I also do get that sometimes they’re just used to move the plot along.

Pretty deep into cold war inspiration, not only is it interested in space travel, but the main plot is kind if a Twilight Zone episode’s plot was “Imagine if we had a communist utopia, sure it’d be cool but we’d have no motivation to do art or cool stuff and also whoever is enforcing the communism would be an authoritarian dictator forcing us to live this way.”

There are a lot of weird moments regarding human race and gender. There’s a strange dichotomy where it all sounds offensive now, but for something written by a white man in the 1950s, it’s still better than what it could’ve been, I guess? I like these two analyses on the topics: Flawed 1950s Anti-Racism (Childhood's End) , A World Without Feminism (Childhood's End)

★★★★☆