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In his sci-fi classic from 1953 (revised in 1989), Clarke dabbles dangerously with some of humanity’s worst tendencies.
No doubt, Clarke was a far-sighted, even prescient man. He wrote an article in 1945, “Extraterrestrial Relays,” which is credited with founding communication satellites. His 1951 book, The Exploration of Space, supposedly fired JFK’s imagination to undertake the moon project.
But the launch of his stellar sci-fi career came with Childhood’s End, which arrived with a splash, a futuristic tale in three acts.
In Part I, humanoids – some decades hence from time of writing – are finally visited by an alien race, dubbed the Overlords, whose massive floating air ships and technology dazzle and subdue without a fight. As the end of Chapter 1 warns: “The human race was no longer alone.” [p.5]
It is a Brave New World of sorts. The Overlords remain aloof, never directly themselves for two generations, while whipping the earth into some sort of earthly paradise, where wars are eradicated, hunger eliminated, and most diseases defeated.
How is this achieved? As the opening of an early chapter in Part II, tendentiously titled The Golden Age, explains:
Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal – and power. [p.62]
Supervisor Karellen only speaks directly to the U.N. General Secretary, named Stormgen, whom he transports up to the mother ship for occasional chats. Needless to say, Stormgen becomes his ally, while dealing with a few pockets of non-violent resistance, such as one led by the Freedom League. Like a good bureaucrat, Stormgen “had faith in Karellen, and they had not. That was the fundamental difference, and there was nothing he could do about it.” [p.8]
The Freedom League leader argues, “Even Supervisor Karellen, for all his powers, cannot wipe out a thousand years of history at the stroke of the pen” [p.8] and summarizes the League’s demands as “Freedom to control our own lives, under God’s guidance.” [p.9] Good luck with that.
But Karellen intimates that he, too, is but only bureaucrat, working at the behest of others:
I wish people would stop thinking of me as a dictator, and remember I’m only a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy in whose shaping I had no hand. [p.14]
The heart, then, of the novel’s dramatic flow is this battle of opposing forces, under the unseen, undisclosed hand of an even greater colonizer, named the Overmind. A kind of “cosmic consciousness,” an “Overmind” is later postulated by the likes of the mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as the “Cosmic Christ” or the “divine in evolution,” and writers such as Terence McKenna and Philip K. Dick as the Logos or VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence).
The benign reign of the Overlords – which we learn was instigated to save the human race from planetary and/or self destruction – ushers in a “Golden Age,” a heaven on earth if you will. “By the standards of all earlier ages, it was Utopia. … Production had become largely automatic: the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in such unending streams that all the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free” [p.64] and “Life was more leisurely than it had been for generations.” [p.65]
With such materialistic bliss, the Freedom League, among others, never had a chance. But other transformations accompany:
Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that had existed before the coming of the Overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism – perhaps the most austere of all religions – still survived. The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly. With the rise of education, they had already been slowly dissolving…. Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones. [pp.66-67]
What else makes the age “Golden”? It is the peace of One World Governance – the dream of every U.N. bureaucrat and most Leftists – whose seeds had already been planted: “Even before the Overlords came to Earth, the sovereign state was dying.” [p.36]
The Golden Age is, no less, the resurrected Age of Reason:
The age of reason, pre-maturely welcomed by the leaders of the French Revolution two and a half centuries before, had now really arrived. This time, there was no mistake. [p.103]
No mistake? Yet, it is noted, with such material bliss comes some downside. Indeed, Part III, titled The Last Generation, moves us from Utopia, inevitably, to a kind of happy Dystopia – whee, we get to evolve!
When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they has also abolished adventure. [p.85]
Not only that, the arts wilted, and even scientific advances halted – why bother, in the face of the Overlords’ “overwhelming intellectual power” [p.10]?
As the leader of a (pacific) rebel community, called New Athens, put it:
Was it possible, he sometimes said to himself, that despite all their enormous intelligence the Overlords did not really understand mankind, and were making a terrible mistake from the best of motives? Suppose, in all their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man? [p.139]
Indeed, the plot had already thickened when the Overlords decided humanity was mature enough – after fifty plus years of social engineering and conditioning – to see what they actually looked like:
There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, and barbed tail – all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. [p.61]
Clark had ended his prior short story “Guardian Angel” – from which Childhood’s End was expanded – with this surprise, this jolt of the Devil as a benign alien. One recalls that many cults, including Madame Blavasky’s Theosophical Society, looks upon Lucifer as the true Angel of Light, who liberated mankind – rather than enslaved it – when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Indeed, the novel’s very title, Childhood’s End, remits to the child-like innocence of mankind in the Garden of Eden. To extend the parallel, is free will still free when Clockwork Orange-level (if non-violent) conditioning leads humanity down a primrose path?
So why is Act III, or Part III, titled The Last Generation? The novel’s dramatic tension (what are the aliens up to?) is resolved by the transmogrification of all of earth’s children into the Overmind – making all missed-boat adults the “last generation” who either suicide or fade away after all children are removed. (This was the motive of sending the Overlords to save humanity from self-destruction: to preserve them long enough for this cosmic evolution.) Herein the novel takes a very dark turn.
As Christian author Carl Teichrib, in his comprehensive book titled Game of Gods, points out:
Roughly twenty years later Russian theosophical thinker, P.D. Ouspensky, described “cosmic consciousness” as “trans-humanizing a man into a god.” What was being described from an esoteric position was a type of Singularity, a point when spiritual technique ushers in a planetary transformation, and a time when Man ceases being human on the evolutionary path. [p.454]
Clark, an English futurist, brings quite a bag of tricks to his visioning. Not only does he envision/anticipate space travel, jet transport, and 5-minute Door Dash, but warns of the risks of 3 hours (!) of daily entertainment binges, and the equivalent of Universal Basic Income – not to mention the Singularity-risk of technology staging a coup, as Hal tries to do in Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But the question remains, does Clark view his sci-fi fantasy as a dystopic warning of mankind’s future from the mishandling of scientific advances (necessitating adult, or alien, intervention) or as an utopic evolution which is all but inevitable? If we are all (or destined to be) little gods – as the Devil promises Eve in the Garden – then why not welcome our absorption into the Divine Universe, to grow up if you will?
Clark revised his 1954 fantasy in 1990 and added both a confusing new prologue and a perplexing statement to the copyright page, “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.” In the prologue, he explains this was to counter the Overlord’s admonition that “The stars are not for Man” – when he, Clark, was all about the stars being for Man. Later on, in several letters and public statements, he distanced himself from the novel’s thrust, extending his copyright-page caveat to the fantasy’s cataclysmic ending – where the most sympathetic characters are the Overlords who, alas, are stuck in an evolutionary cul-de-sac and childless.
Yet it is hard to believe his disclaimer was his intention from the start. Clark was a professed "crypto-Buddhist" who hated organized religion, so it is not difficult to view the book as a treatise on Eastern Mysticism as absorbed into New Age thinking – and its All-is-One mind-meld. The book was written soon after the trauma of two World Wars, amidst the euphoria of the creation of the United Nations (as our terrestrial savior). In this view, the Overlord’s “overwhelming intellection power” with which to rule the rubes of humanity via “social engineering” is every U.N. bureaucrat’s wet dream.
This is a philosophically confused novel, with its theology equally muddled. It turns out the Overlords “would serve the Overmind because they had no choice, but even in that service they would not lose their souls” while humans are “destroying” theirs. What does the word soul even mean to an avowed atheist such as Clark?
Lastly, Clark’s vision is perhaps the most pro-Colonialist work of his time. If Supervisor Kerellen is only benignly “ a civil servant trying to administer a colonial policy,” then what keeps the smarter of us, in Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, from colonizing lesser civilizations?
Unhappily, the sensation of Clark’s inaugural book in mid 20th century not only cemented his fame but accelerated Western Civilization’s decline into secular and anti-Christian beliefs, while elevating the “expert” or “intelligent” bureaucrat from childhood to near idolhood.
I would like to believe that Clark eventually came to the light and saw the dangerous, authoritarian impulses glorified in his fantasy – but his life trajectory argues otherwise. Rather, his late disclaimers imply he didn’t have the confidence in his own twisted beliefs.
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke (1953), Random House, Del Ray paperback (1990)
Ben Batchelder is the author of four extended travel yarns and has been a Contributor to The Miami Independent since its inception. Contact him at his author site benbatchelder.com
