Loved itI think this is the copy that I that I read. We had a handful of science fiction books kind of floating around. This was one of them. Have not gone back to it and read it since. It's another formative book.
Review 1 of 3
Childhood’s End (1952)
Others: Leaning positive Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by British author Arthur C. Clarke. The story follows the peaceful alien invasion of Earth by the mysterious Overlords, whose arrival ends all war, helps form a world government, and turns the planet into a near-utopia. Many questions are asked about the origins and mission of the aliens, but they avoid answering, preferring to remain in their ships, governing through indirect rule. Decades later, the Overlords eventually show themselves, and their impact on human culture leads to a Golden Age. However, the last generation of children on Earth begin to display powerful psychic abilities, heralding their evolution into a group mind, a transcendent form of life.
- ISBN:
- 9781509838431
- Length:
- 220 pages
Genres: science fiction
Lists: …
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1956 · 254 pages · 6 reviews
Others: Mostly negativeOmnibus
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Others: PositiveComment by John Clute: We know better now, of course. But they still entrance us, the old page-turners from the glory days of American SF, half a century or so ago, when the world was full of futures we were never going to have. In the mid-1940s, when he began to publish the episodes that would be assembled as City in 1952, Clifford Simak, a Minneapolis-based journalist and author, could still carry us away with the dream that cars and pollution and even the great cities of the world – "Huddling Place", the title of one of these tales, is his own derisory term for them – would soon be brushed off the map by Progress, leaving nothing behind but tasteful exurbs filled with middle-class nuclear families living the good life, with fishing streams and greenswards sheltering each home from the stormy blast. Fortunately, Simak soon gets past this demented vision of a near-future world saved by technological fixes, a dementia common then to SF writers and gurus and politicians alike, and launches into an astonishingly eventful narrative of the next 10,000 years as seen through the eyes of one family and the immortal robot Jenkins, and all told with a weird pastoral serenity that for a kid like me seemed near to godlike. In its course City touches on almost everything dear to 1940s SF, and to me remembering. Robots. Genetic Engineering. Space. Jupiter. Domed cities. Keeps. Hiveminds. Matter transmission. Telepathy. Parallel worlds. Paranormal empathy. Mutants. Supermen. It's all there, and, thanks to Simak's skilled hand at the wheel, it's all in place: suave, sibylline, swift. The whole is framed as a series of legends told by the uplifted Dogs who have replaced the human race, now gone for ever. They have been bred not to kill. At the end, only Jenkins remains to keep them from learning how to repeat history and die. It all seemed immensely sad and wise then, but fun. It still does.
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Loved it
MixedPart three I still don't think I don't think I like it very much. And I think it's because it takes away a lot of the interpretation and thought process away from the reader, away from the reading experience. ... But I still think it's great. Any book that gets me thinking this much is just great. I'm going to read it again.
Loved itchildhood's in was good enough to say yeah that's one of the best sci-fi authors ever you know because childhood's in is amazing I have the I have the folio Edition it's it's it's in my top 10 books of all time
Review 1 of 3
Not a fanchildhood's end brings up the rear for this batch I didn't like it much I felt the story was patchy even for a short book over long perhaps it would have been better as a novella or perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood for it
Loved itI think that this book is spectacular it's one of the best science fiction books out there and it easily crushed a lot of books on my top science fiction list