51 pages • 1 hour read
Arthur C. ClarkeChildhood's End
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Arthur C. Clarke
British author Arthur C. Clarke is commonly considered one of the three most influential science fiction writers of the 20th century. In addition to a successful career as a writer, Clarke was also an engineer who helped pioneer communications technology. He spent more than half his life in Sri Lanka, where he explored the ocean. His most famous work is 2001: A Space Odyssey, written while he crafted the film script with Stanley Kubrick. Before his death in 2008, Clarke had written and published over 70 works of fiction and nonfiction.
In the foreword to the 1990 edition of Childhood’s End, Clarke explains both a disclaimer at the beginning of the novel and the revisions he made to the first chapter. The book contains the disclaimer that “the opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author,” which Clarke explains initially referenced the ban on space travel featured in the novel. In 1990, he adds that his previous belief in the paranormal, which frames several plot developments in Childhood’s End, has been replaced almost entirely with skepticism.
A decade after the publication of Childhood’s End, Clarke published Profiles of the Future, a nonfiction book in which he articulates his three laws, including his most well-known quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (“Biography.” Arthur C. Clarke Foundation). Science and faith or magic are often treated as diametric opposites, so Clarke’s attitude on the connection between them is revolutionary for possible models of the future. Childhood’s End can be seen as the development of Clarke’s unique perspective on magic and technology.
Historical Context: The Space Race and the Cold War
Childhood’s End was written in 1952, seven years after the end of World War II and before the advent of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The original prologue of the novel features two scientists developing rockets for space travel—one in the Soviet Union, the other in the United States. Their research is derailed by the arrival of the Overlords. Clarke didn’t imagine major progress being achieved in the space race until the mid-1970s; however, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957. In 1969, US astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins successfully completed the moon landing, achieving what was widely seen as a decisive victory in the space race. Given the resolution of the space race, and George H. W. Bush’s inaugural promise to get humanity to Mars, Clarke revised the first chapter of Childhood’s End in 1989. In the 1990 revision, the space race has resolved, and the Overlords interrupt a mission to Mars rather than the development of rockets. However, in 2001, when the plans to land a human on Mars had stalled, Clarke republished Childhood’s End with the original 1953 first chapter as the novel’s opening, moving the 1990 revision to an appendix.
The Cold War is the term for the decades-long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, beginning with tensions arising from the development of nuclear power by the USSR in 1947 and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although there were never direct military confrontations between the nations, there were a series of armed conflicts in countries allied with one nation or the other. The Cold War resulted in significant anxiety in the West related to atomic war and the tension between the communist/collectivist Soviet Union and the individualist United States (“Toward a New World Order.” Britannica). Although the Cold War doesn’t directly impact Childhood’s End beyond the first chapter, the tensions and anxieties related to the conflict directly inform the primary themes and dichotomies.
Literary Context: Science Fiction
Science fiction is typically described as a form of speculative fiction that engages questions related to science, progress, and technology. Many science fiction works deal with space, the future of mankind, or both. Science fiction often concerns itself specifically with the possible consequences of various imagined or in-development scientific advances. Scholars and practitioners debate the precise origins of science fiction, but many consider it to have begun amid the intense scientific and technological ferment of the 19th century, in works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835).
In subsequent decades, the genre flourished as a means for writers and readers to make sense of the rapid technological and cultural change happening around them. H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine, for example, imagines the possible consequences of unchecked industrialization and the social inequality it creates. By the mid-20th century, writers like Arthur C. Clarke were using science fiction to explore the possibilities of space travel and to respond to the apocalyptic fears engendered by the Cold War. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is set in the future, and its thematic questions relate specifically related to the possibilities and dangers of space travel, as well as to the Cold War-driven fear that new technologies might bring about the end of the world as humans have known it.
The 1950s was a rich time for science fiction novels. Along with Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein published extensively, and they became known as the “big three” in science fiction writers (“The Big Three: Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein.” SfandFantasy). The mid-20th century was a time of immense and fast progress in science and technology. Science fiction found a significant readership in this time period, as readers watched the world change rapidly with the advent of space travel, the threat of atomic war, and the invention of computing and communication technologies that revolutionized global connection.
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