Now I understand, said the last man.

I picked this up on a whim after it was featured in a series I was watching back during the summer, and I'll admit that this decision had a lot to do with how striking the cover of this edition is coupled with that title.

My verdict: 'Childhood's End' is ...alright.

This is a case of getting two stories in one, one of which I found infinitely more interesting and complex than the other. The story we start with wherein the alien race of 'Overlords' comes to earth and without much effort forces humanity to stop destroying itself and instead live in a sort of coerced peace was compelling. I didn't really agree with Clarke's central thesis of this section, which amounted to: "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." (p.141) The idea that good art or progress can only come from conflict or tragedy has never sat right with me.

In her video essay, 'Protest Music of the Bush Era,' Lindsay Ellis points out the hollowness of taking this view of art and suffering:

"In times of great cultural stress, there's this sort of impulse to try to give meaning to the badness and the suffering. Like, if you put one suffering unit in, you get one art unit out. And I understand that impulse; you need to give meaning to, you know, the badness, but I think it's kind of misguided to give meaning to suffering by saying 'hey, at least we'll get great art out of it [...] Like, yeah the Holocaust sucked, but we got 'The Producers,' didn't we?'"

She goes on to talk about how not only does this way of thinking feel tone-deaf when taken out of the abstract, but it puts pressure on people living through the badness and the suffering to produce something meaningful when they're likely already mentally taxed, a sentiment The Onion fabulously pokes fun at:



So this idea that suffering results in productivity which results in progress/art is already one I don't like from that side, and I doubly don't like the implication that therefore peace would be the end of art and progress, as though much of our progress and art hasn't come from people who have no conflict or struggle in their lives and are, in fact, privileged enough to live lives where they have nothing stopping them from pondering the apples falling on their heads or tinkering around with new types of music. Like, sure, it's not untrue that struggle can lead to productivity, which can lead to progress/art -- there are plenty of examples of this, and the 'starving artist' stereotype doesn't exist for no reason at all, but it's absolute post-capitalist brain rot to feed poor, struggling people the narrative that they should be grateful, actually, because they're the only ones in the enviable position to live under the necessary conditions to move the world forward. Sure, Jan.

That all being said, the other, more subtle, exploration is of colonialism. I'm not sure that was Clarke's intention, but alien invasion stories by their very nature rub up against and are a comment on colonialism. As with most of these narratives, Clarke lands on the logical side of 'colonialism is bad, actually.'

Now, in many, many alien invasion stories, the attempted subjugation of humanity by the aliens is overtly forceful and often violent, but usually ultimately unsuccessful -- and we cheer for humanity's victory because on some level we recognize that it's, well, it's not very nice to do that. Colonialism historically was very forceful and violent, but the victors don't tend to paint it that way, so the narrative we tend to get is something along the lines of 'well, yes, it was kind of unpleasant, but honestly, those people are better off now because [insert some kind of justification].'

But in this one, the subjugation of humanity is not overtly forceful -- the Overlords just kind of arrive and tell all the Earthlings that they aren't going to have war between nations anymore, and because they have superior technology, they can wave a hand and stop all attempts to disobey with no effort at all, and more importantly, no bloodshed at all. And yet, there is tension among the people around when the Overlords first arrive between those who think the imposition of peace is good and those who think that despite the good, there's something nefarious about the loss of autonomy.

"Can you deny that the Overlords have brought security, peace, and prosperity to the world?" "That is true. But they've taken our liberty." (p.14)

And that tension, though it falls to the background, never really goes away. One of the central POV characters, Jan, rebels against the Overlords by stowing away on one of their ships in defiance of the insistence that 'the stars are not for man.'

In the end, Jan realizes that humans were never really going to be able to reach the heights of the Overlords or their master, the Overmind. This would seem to suggest that the Overlords taking over control of Earth was justifiable because humanity was intellectually inferior. However, by having Jan remain suspicious to the end of the intentions of the Overlords, and having those suspicions justified in the narrative, we still reach the conclusion that colonialism is bad even when done without bloodshed and that it is only ever self-serving and never about helping anyone. And not only that, but that it's bad even if the conquerors are 'superior' in some way to the conquered.

Again, no idea if this was Clarke's intention, but the messaging is nonetheless there.

All of this is rich enough material to bite into, but when it came to the more intensely sci-fi twist involving answers to questions I didn't really find that interesting to begin with (why did the Overlords come to earth? What else is there in the universe beyond the Overlords?) I kind of lost interest.

Apparently, there's a TV miniseries of it from 2015, but I got the sense that it leans most heavily into the second half of the plot rather than the first, so I'm unlikely to follow up with it even though it appears to have pretty good reviews.