topics:  | science-fiction

Without warning, giant silver ships from deep space appear in the skies above
every major city on Earth. Manned by the Overlords, in fifty years, they
eliminate ignorance, disease, and poverty. Then this golden age ends--and
then the age of Mankind begins...
 w:Plot summary: Childhood's End is about humanity's transformation and
integration to an interstellar "hive mind", the Overmind. It also touches
upon such matters as cruelty to animals, man's inability to live in a utopian
society, and the idea of being "The Last Man on Earth". The 1953 edition of
the story begins at the height of the cold war some thirty years after the
fall of the Third Reich, with attempts by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union
to launch nuclear rockets into space for military purposes, threatening
imminent doom.
    The humans' arms race is brought to a halt by the sudden appearance of
mysterious spaceships above all the Earth's great cities. After a week of
silence and resultant increasing tension, the aliens, who become known as the
Overlords, announce by world-wide broadcast that they have benign intentions
and desire to help humanity, but that they will henceforth assume the minimum
amount of control which will achieve their aims. As the enforcers of peace,
they bring salvation and life, and yet also the death of some dreams, as
humanity is no longer completely independent, nor may it pursue certain
scientific explorations, such as space.
    The humans remain suspicious, as the Overlords never appear in
person. The Overlords' representative, Karellen, does speak with the
Secretary General of the United Nations Rikki Stormgren, but is always hidden
behind a pane of one way glass. The two develop a great deal of respect for
one another, though it is clear they are not equals. To allay the inevitable
suspicions of some, Karellen promises the Overlords will reveal themselves
physically in fifty years, after humanity has matured and become comfortable
with their presence.
    Under the (mild) domination of the Overlords, Mankind enters a golden age
of the greatest peace and prosperity ever known, albeit at the expense of
some creativity and freedom. Not every Earthling is content with the bargain,
nor accepts the beneficence of the Overlords' long-term
intentions. Stormgren, with Karellen's help, survives a kidnap attempt by
subversive humans suspicious of the Overlords. Stormgren secretly harbours
lingering curiosity about the real Overlord nature and smuggles a device
aboard Karellen's spaceship to see behind the one-way screen that separates
them. Years later he tells a questioning reporter the device failed. The
novel strongly hints that the device did indeed capture an image of the
Overlords, which Stormgren saw, but that Stormgren agrees with the Overlords:
mankind is unready for what that image revealed.
    True to their word, fifty years after arrival, the Overlords appear in
person. They resemble the traditional human folklore image of demons: bipeds
with large wings, horned heads, and tails. The Overlords are taller than
humans and of proportionally more massive bodies covered with a hard, black
armour shell. The light from Earth's sun is too harsh for them, because their
planet's sun has a dimmer redder light, and, though they can breathe Earth's
atmosphere, the mix of gases in their own atmosphere is more
comfortable. Humankind has, however, grown accustomed to the Overlords by
this time and accepts them with open arms, and with their help, creates a
utopian world.
    Although humanity and the Overlords have developed peaceful and even
friendly relations by now, the spread of equal goods and the ban on building
space ships capable of travelling past the Earth's moon causes some sects to
believe their innovation and independence is being suppressed and that
culture is becoming stagnant. In response, those sects establish "New
Athens", an island colony.
    Some ten years after the Overlords revealed themselves to humanity, human
children (starting in New Athens) begin displaying telepathic and telekinetic
abilities and as a result, become estranged from their parents. Karellen then
reveals the true purpose of why the Overlords came to Earth. They are in
service to the Overmind, a cosmic mind amalgamated from ancient galactic
civilizations, freed from the limitations of ordinary matter. The Overlords
are not themselves capable of joining the Overmind, but the Overmind has
charged them with the duty of fostering humanity's transition to a higher
plane of existence and merger with the Overmind. The Overlords' resemblance
to the devil of human folklore is later explained by a form of racial memory:
humans fear the Overlords because we fear the end of our species as we know
it. Karellen expresses an envy of humanity; his race is trapped as they are,
as they are not now capable of joining the Overmind, though he hopes they
will eventually learn how to do so.
    Karellen announces that the children with psychic powers will be
segregated from the rest of humanity on a continent of their own, and only
these children will merge with the Overmind. No more children are born; the
narration subtly hints that most of the parents commit suicide, while their
children evolve towards merging with the Overmind. New Athens is then
destroyed by the leaders detonating a nuclear bomb on it.
    The last man alive is Jan Rodricks, a physicist, who will witness
mankind's final evolutionary transformation. He stowed away on an Overlord
supply ship earlier in the story in a successful attempt to travel to the
Overlord home planet, which he correctly guessed orbits a star of the Carina
constellation. As a physicist, Rodricks knows of the relativistic twin
paradox effect: the Overlords' ships travel at a significant fraction of the
speed of light, and as a result, the trip to the Overlord planet and back to
Earth will only take four months in his subjective, personal time-frame, but
the amount of elapsed 'objective' time will be, at minimum, 80 years, or the
length of time light would take to make the similar journey, although the
actual trip takes much longer. (The Overlord star system – known as NGS
549672 to astronomers on Earth – is forty light-years distant from Earth.)
    When Rodricks returns from the Overlord home world, he expects no one on
Earth will remember him, nevertheless, he is unprepared for the return:
mankind, as he knew it, died. About three hundred million naked young beings,
physically human but otherwise with nothing common to Man, remain on the
quarantined continent. They are the final, physical form of human evolution
before merging with the Overmind. Life — not only human life, but all other
forms on the planet — was exterminated by them, and the vast cities that Jan
remembers are all dark.
    Some Overlords remain on Earth, studying the evolved children. It also is
revealed here that the Overlords have met and conditioned other races for the
Overmind, and that humanity is the fifth race the Overmind will collect.
    When the evolved children have grown strong enough to mentally alter the
Earth's rotation and affect other planetary adjustments, it becomes too
dangerous to remain and the Overlords prepare to leave. They offer Rodricks
the opportunity of leaving with them, but he chooses to remain as witness to
Earth's dissolution; mankind's offspring evolved to a higher existence,
requiring neither a body nor a place, so ends mankind's childhood.
    The story's last scene details Karellen's final backward look at the
Solar System, which becomes no more noticeable among the stars as it recedes
than the loss of one small planet in the system. He is emotionally depressed,
having seen yet another race evolve to the beyond, while he and his race must
remain behind, limited to their current form. Despite that, he renders a
final salute to mankind, considering whether or not conditioning them for the
Overmind helped his goal of deciphering the evolutionary secret for his race
to merge with the Overmind. He then turns away from the view, the reader
presumes, to await the Overmind's next order.