Sometime in the not too distant future, man is about to begin his own voyages into space when giant spaceships suddenly appear in the skies over the world's major cities. The Overlords have arrived. Unlike so many aliens in SF, these mighty beings, despite their appearance (unveiled in a brilliant revelatory moment about a third of the way through the book), are not out to destroy humanity but to redeem it. Under their tutelage mankind heads towards utopia. Poverty, crime and unhappiness become half-forgotten scourges of a time before the Overlords came. Science and rationality rule the world, as Clarke delights in describing his vision of what a sane society might be. But the children of this utopia are about to take one further evolutionary step. As they prepare to transcend previous human limits, the Overlords are again there to guide them.

When discussion turns to the predictive power of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke's name is often the first to be mentioned. With his own scientific background (he studied physics and mathematics at the University of London), Clarke was, from the beginning, intent on providing his readers with convincing visions of what the future might hold. Yet today the novels and short stories of technological prescience seem less interesting than a book like Childhood's End with its suggestions of religious mysticism sheltering behind the science. Best-known now for his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the innovative 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had its starting point in his story 'The Sentinel' and was later expanded into a novel, Clarke is no master prose stylist or ground-breaking original talent but he has proved one of the most long-lasting and influential exponents of a particular style of hard SF. Childhood's End is not typical of his work but it remains one of his finest achievements.

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