Thinking back to my teens in the early 1980s, I don’t remember Childhood’s End (1953, UK) being one of Arthur C Clarke’s more celebrated novels. There was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Sri Lanka), of course, a novelisation of a film adaptation of one of Clarke’s own short stories. And Rendezvous with Rama (1972, Sri Lanka). I also recall The Fountains of Paradise (1979, Sri Lanka) being published to much fanfare.
But this was twenty-five to thirty years after Childhood’s End’s initial publication, so perhaps it’s no surprise. I did read the novel, of course, although I don’t recall exactly when, along with many others by Clarke.
Much later, there was a television adaptation — in 2015, in fact — but all I remember of that is giant saucers hovering over cities and Charles Dance virtually unrecognisable in sfx make-up.
Which was, more or less, my abiding memory of the novel too: giant alien spaceships appear over Earth’s major cities, the aliens refuse to show themselves, but fifty years later do so and prove to look pretty much like the Devil from Christian mythology. Yet, that’s only a minor part of the story, as I discovered on my recent reread. Yes, the Overseers take over the Earth to safeguard humanity, but that’s only because they’re actually husbanding the race to the next stage of evolution… which is some sort of mental powers type transcendence, a trope subsequently used by a number of science fiction authors, from James Blish to Iain M Banks.
Childhood’s End opens sometime in the 1990s and ends in the 2050s. There’s no reason why it should be set late in the 20th Century — to be fair, the year is not actually given, although in the opening chapter it’s remarked Yuri Gagarin, who was born in 1934, would be an old man if he’d lived — and Clarke’s choice of time period puts a great deal of pressure on his talent for extrapolating the future. Unfortunately he failed. So much so, he rewrote the opening chapters to make them better depict space travel post-Apollo.
Of course, it’s hardly fair to complain that Clarke in 1953 made a hash of 1995. It was a different time then, and what they expected of the future was very much different from what later years expected. Or indeed what actually came to pass. Jetpacks, anyone? Moonbases? We never went to Mars, but now computers are so ubiquitous and small they’re in your pocket, in your car key. Certainly, reading Childhood’s End for the first time in the early 1980s, more than a decade before the book’s story starts, the futurism seemed simply part of the story.
There’s another process at work here too — it’s one thing to remark on Clarke’s hits and misses when it comes to scientific and technological progress; but there are also the social and economic changes which have taken place. And Clarke, a gay man who left the UK a few years after Childhood’s End was published because his sexuality was illegal… Well, I wouldn’t expect him to be a paragon of liberal social values, he was after all a white middle-class man in 1950s Britain, but I certainly wouldn’t expect him to write:
The convenient word ‘n****r’ was no longer taboo in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone.
(asterisks my own)
I’m not entirely daft, I know the word was in common usage in 1950s Britain, although more as a hangover from earlier times — the same word is used as the name of the airfield’s dog, a black Labrador, in The Dam Busters, the 1955 movie set during world War II. But that word “convenient”, that’s the unforgivable element — because the word is not convenient, it’s offensive, and it was considered so in the 1950s.
To make matters worse, Clarke decided not to change or remove this sentence when he re-wrote portions of the book in the 1970s, nor did Gollancz see fit to remove it when they included the novel in their SF Masterworks series.
It has been argued they were right to leave the line as it is. To do otherwise would be censorship. But — There are things in art worth preserving, Bowdlerisation is in principle a bad thing. Painting fig leaves over dangly bits in classical art, whether by Rembrandt or some unnamed painter of vases in Ancient Greece… quite rightly would be seen as spoiling the art. But the sentence above adds nothing to Childhood’s End, except a bad taste in the mouth of any twenty-first century reader. It has nothing to do with the plot, and the character-building which includes the line works just as well without it.
The only thing it does in 2023 is offend.
All speech, spoken or written, has consequences. Some speech is legislated against, and called “hate speech”. With good reason. Some speech is protected from government censure, and so labelled in law “free speech”. And that’s the only test for free speech — will I be arrested and charged for saying this? If the answer is no, even though you might be banned from a social media platform, be refused business by a company, be barred from publication in a venue… your free speech rights have not been infringed. You are not in prison.
Defending a single sentence in a 1953 science fiction novel is not a hill to die on. The same for a new edition of an Agatha Christie novel, an Enid Blyton book, a Roald Dahl novel… If it’s more important to you to preserve the deathless prose of some hack from more than seventy years ago than it is to avoid offending present or future generations of readers of a book, then perhaps you need to rethink your worldview.
Ahem. Back to Childhood’s End.
The appearance of the Overseers’ spaceships, and the bloodless coup which follows, more or less kills every space programme. And indeed progress in pretty much everything grinds to a halt. The lead Overseer, Karellen, deals only with the secretary-general of the UN, a Swedish-speaking Finn, who nonetheless boasts a Finnish first name. Or maybe he was a Finnish-speaking Finn who boasts a Swedish surname, I forget. The first section of the novel is concerned with various plots to learn as much as possible about the Overseer, all of which are foiled by their vastly superior technology.
The next section introduces a young couple, some years after the Overseers have revealed themselves. It transpires, although they do not know it, their children are the next evolutionary step. The family go to live in an artistic colony on a Pacific island, whose very existence undermines the rule of the Overseers but is nevertheless tolerated. For reasons. Things happen.
And then Childhood’s End just gets silly.
I mean, really? Woo woo kids turn into pure thought, everybody else dies, and pity the poor Overseers because they’ll never get to transcend. There are a few stories along the way — the guy who smuggles himself aboard an Overseer ship returning home, but the entire thread is a red herring and tells us little useful about the universe at large; the Overseers’ bizarre interest in parapsychology; even, when you think about it, the fact the Overseers resemble devils, which presupposes an earlier visit to Earth, but even that is never really explored…
(ETA: I had forgotten, until reminded by a comment, that the Overseers had never visited Earth before but their arrival had somehow generated “echoes” back in time. I probably blanked it because it’s such a feeble and implausible idea. It would, of course, explain why devils in Christian mythology are always associated with flying saucers — No, wait…)
Childhood’s End is one of those science fiction novels whose reputation seems to rest entirely on its original appearance. Has it ever been re-evaluated? Because, at least post-1990, it would never have survived a re-evaluation intact. It is, like many so-called science fiction classics, and Asimov’s Foundation (1951, USA) springs to mind as an example, seemingly adjacent to criticism. It’s like any comments directed at the novel simply slide off it.
There’s an interesting idea at the core of Childhood’s End. In the 1950s, perhaps even for a decade or two after, that might have been enough to give the novel a generally positive profile. But a lot has changed since then, and we should not be pandering to the sensibilities of previous decades, we should not be letting their sensibilities poison our choice of reading because no one had the courage to make an appropriate editorial choice.
And I stress appropriate. You can’t make everything palatable to a twenty-first century audience, that’s not the point. Often, it needs to be left in place to stress the historical nature of the fiction. But when it doesn’t impact the story, and the story is ahistorical — e.g., science fiction — then clutching pearls is at best performative and mendacious, and at worst political.
I cannot in good conscience recommend Childhood’s End. If you know its premise, you will gain nothing from reading the novel. Life is too short. Spend it on novels, even others ones from the SF Masterworks series, more worthy of your attention.
