The title of this post is my considered response to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It was my response when I first read it at twelve, and it’s still my response reading it today.
Childhood’s End was published in 1953. It’s a truly classic science fiction novel, and a deeply influential one, and one of the books that makes Clarke’s reputation. It’s also a very very strange book. It does as much as any half dozen normal books, and all in 218 pages, and it does it by setting up expectations and completely overturning them, repeatedly.
The prologue of Childhood’s End is brilliant, and it stands completely alone. It’s 1975. There’s an ex-Nazi rocket scientist in the U.S. worrying that his old friend the ex-Nazi rocket scientist in the U.S.S.R. will reach the moon before him. You’ve read this story a million times, you know where it’s going, you settle in to a smooth familiar kind of ride. Then quietly without any fuss, huge alien ships appear over all of Earth’s major cities. And this is just the first surprise, the first few pages of a book that goes about as far from the standard assumptions and standard future of SF as it’s possible to go.
[Read more: Aliens, utopia, and the end of humanity]