Here’s the problem: I didn’t really like (nor entirely understand) the ending of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End when I first read it. So, it’s difficult to parse out my feelings about the third and final part of Syfy’s miniseries. Was it as frustrating to see the human race take a certain evolutionary path? Yes. Was it as emotionally earned? Ehhh.
Spoilers for Childhood’s End Part 3: “The Children.”
We pick up four years after Jennifer’s birth at the end of Part 2: She’s now a precocious child who has somehow managed to hide her creepy, uncanny-valley behavior from her parents—until all around the world, children suddenly start saying “Jennifer” with dead eyes and hands raised toward the sky. Their parents, the ones who enjoyed this post-Overlords golden age, are understandably freaked out. Clearly utopia erased the phrase “sins of the father,” because the parents seem utterly shocked that the Overlords are demanding something of their children in exchange for their carefree lives. Not least Jake and Amy, who immediately start packing and cart Jennifer and Tommy to New Athens, a community meant to emulate pre-Overlords life. And by that, they mean New York City. Seriously—the Greggsons step through “customs,” and there are honking yellow taxi cabs ready to drive them to their new lives. I know NYC is supposed to be the cultural capital of the world—and yes, there’s plenty of art and life in New Athens—but the comparison is rather heavy-handed.
Unfortunately, the sequences in New Athens take up so little of the total story that it almost would have been better to omit them. Not to keep harping on comparisons to the book, but that version of the colony actually sounded like a real social experiment, like a big middle finger to the Overlords and their sanitized utopia. Unlike the miniseries’ kumbaya “we have no immigration policy” promise, the New Athens of the book employs a rigorous battery of psychological tests to ensure that their new citizens will actually fit in and make beneficial contributions to the community. New Athens is intended to be a complete lifestyle change for the Greggsons, not a desperate escape from Jennifer’s Children of the Corn army of tots. Who, by the way, follow her even there.
Speaking of trips, Milo Rodricks has become even more obsessed with seeing the Overlords’ home planet. Maybe it’s because he’s observed how the children are so much fitter and freer than their parents; perhaps he continues to chafe at the Overlords’ benevolent but restrictive control. At any rate, he convinces his scientist girlfriend Rachel to stow him away with a menagerie of animals being sent to the alien world. The adaptation trades having Jan Rodricks hide in an airtight coffin inside a whale skeleton for Milo voluntarily allowing himself to be vacuum-sealed in the hold along with other animals (including, I noticed, a killer whale). It certainly makes for a more terrifying sequence on television, but the endgame is the same: He makes it to the Overlords’ planet, check. Gets to see that yes, it does look a lot like humans’ vision of hell, check. Meets the Overmind and discovers the children’s destiny to be subsumed into it, check.
Then turns back around and goes back to Earth, 80 years later… check. Except that while Milo had figured he’d get to see Rachel again, albeit at the end of her life, and meet his peers’ grandchildren, he hadn’t counted on humanity being nearly extinct by the time he returned.
To be honest, the way the book was laid out actually diverted me from guessing what the Overlords’ final plan for the human race was. When I discovered that the next generation of children after the Overlords’ arrival are telepathic and already drawn to the Overmind, and that they depart Earth while their parents die out within a generation… I was incredibly upset. I think because I always read the book from the perspective of the golden age generation; not that I have kids, but I could understand their frustration and helplessness. For all that the Overlords eliminate war and greed and bring about peace and prosperity, by keeping humans constrained to Earth, they take away their independence and treat them like children. Yet at the same time, the Overlords oversee the birth of a new generation and decide when humans are no longer able to procreate (like in that sad scene of the woman miscarrying her baby), then take those children. It leaves the golden age humans in an odd position; they’ve served their purpose and are “rewarded” with the ability to live out their remaining days, as not quite children and not quite adults.
Or, in the case of New Athens’ mayor Jerry Hallcross, they can trigger atomic bombs and obliterate humans’ attempt at independence. You get the impression that Jake and Amy, after watching Tommy and Jennifer literally slip through their fingers, are oddly relieved just to have one another again. It’s an interesting, ashamed selfishness that I would have liked to see depicted more consistently throughout the miniseries.
Or, in the case of Ricky Stormgren, they can die anyway, right around the same time the children merge with the Overmind. I see where Syfy was going with giving us Ricky and Ellie as an emotional anchor, but their storyline lacked depth. Mostly I felt awful for poor Ellie, eternally second-place to Ricky’s dead wife Annabelle. Yet she soldiers on, trying to woo him to her with silly photos of their present, while he keeps wanting Karellen to beam him up so he can stay stuck in the past in the imagined honeymoon hotel room. (Things started getting really uncomfortable when he was reliving pillow talk and sexytimes in his memory, then realized he was alone.) Credit to Ricky, he eventually realizes that he needs to let go of the past and the what-ifs to embrace his present. Too bad that by the time he tells Karellen to bury the memory room, he’s already close to death from the alien radiation. (Something I just considered—could his continued visits have sped up his deterioration?)
So, Ricky and Ellie spend their final moments staring up at the stars, guessing at what the constellations mean, because that’s as far as humans will ever get. It’s a sobering visual, and the kind of small, rare, key moment this miniseries has brought.
It’s actually too bad that Ricky’s closure was more compelling than Milo’s ultimate fate as Earth’s first interstellar traveler and its last human. (If we don’t count Jennifer, which we can’t, really, she’s not human anymore.) Believe me, I adore time-dilation stories—I’ve written about The Sparrow at length, and I cried unabashedly at Interstellar—but by the end of Milo’s story, I couldn’t sum up enough emotion to really care. It’s certainly an interesting commentary on complacency; Milo could have been content enough on Earth with Rachel and studying the evolved children and their burgeoning powers, but he wanted more. And yes, he sealed his fate more than he ever realized when he got on that Overlord ship.
But by the time he was sitting on a couch in a dystopian-looking city, narrating Earth’s final moments to an Overlord sphere, I felt much like Karellen must have: distantly sad for these characters, but mostly watching to make them feel better. And, sure, we can leave that bit of music just hovering in space over Earth’s smithereens so that travelers can appreciate it, if you really want. Mostly I just want to jet out of this solar system by now.
“The sun must set on every day,” Karellen tells Ricky early on, and so it is with this Syfy miniseries. Thank the Overmind.
Natalie Zutter is ready to watch The Expanse and The Magicians now, and has higher hopes for both. Read more of her work on Twitter and elsewhere.
I don’t think the Overlords caused any of the changes to the children or the cessation of childbirth. The Overmind caused that, or the children themselves did as part of humanity’s evolution. The Overlords were just the midwives, as Karellen said, helping the process go more smoothly.
And the “dystopian city” at the end was, I think, the ruins of Rupert Boyce’s compound in South Africa.
My thoughts:
The first half or so of the final installment was quite tedious. In the book, Rikki Stormgren was featured only in the first part of the novel, and the miniseries never really established a good reason for keeping Ricky Stormgren around beyond that. He didn’t do anything in part 3 except slowly die, and continue to be obsessed over his lost love Annabelle — which was ridiculous, since he’d been living with Ellie for something like 25 years at this point. It’s poor writing to have a story that spans so many decades and have the characters undergo no real change or growth in that interval. And having Ricky still be obsessed with someone he lost half a lifetime before just made him pathetic and was an affront to Ellie’s character. This didn’t work, and it had no bearing on the overall story. It was totally pointless. When Ricky eventually died, my reaction was “Finally, now we can get on with the actual story.” I kind of liked his character in part 1, but his and Ellie’s story should’ve ended then.
And the time wasted on Ricky could’ve been better spent fleshing out the plots that actually mattered and came from the book — the Greggsons in New Athens and Milo’s journey to the Overlords’ planet. The New Athens part was handled superficially — we just got one introductory scene with the guy in charge of the place, and the script’s heavyhanded approach to villains was still very much in effect — he seemed all nice on the surface, but was surrounded by garish artwork celebrating war and bloodshed and talking about how he’d rather burn New Athens down than lose it, and it became obvious what was going to happen. In the book, the fate of New Athens was a consensual choice by its citizens, with those who disagreed allowed to leave. Making it one lunatic’s unilateral act was more shallow and came off as gratuitous.
As for the children’s evolution and ascension, that was poorly handled as well. The scene where they floated up into the air was risible. I was staring at the screen in disbelief and asking, “Seriously? Seriously?!” Even before that, the miniseries seemed to be trying to rip off Torchwood: Children of Earth rather than adapting Childhood’s End. But the levitation scene was where they really lost it.
The one part of “The Children” that worked for me was Milo’s journey to the Overlords’ planet. This was the part I was most worried about — I feared they’d either leave it out entirely or have their white farmboy hero get to make the journey instead of Rodricks. So it was a relief that they kept it basically intact. It wasn’t perfect. They sort of lost the spirit of pure scientific curiosity that drove Rodricks in the book, instead having Milo do it because he feared a danger to Earth, and having him more concerned about that danger and his lost love (a relationship that was never sufficiently established to justify his pathos at its outcome) than about the discovery itself. And the depiction of the Overlords’ world was too hellish and not as rich and interesting as the visuals Clarke described. Still, they kept the essence of it intact, and after a night and a half that was mostly padding and lame subplots, the miniseries finally anchored itself in Clarke’s story again and brought it to essentially the same resolution. I’m not sure if I’m actually satisfied by that so much as relieved, but at least it wasn’t a total disaster in the end.
In the final analysis, I feel this miniseries should’ve been told over two nights instead of three. Lose all the Ricky/Ellie stuff after part 1, lose Peretta altogether, keep it to the plots that actually came from the book. It’s certainly possible to add new ideas to a book adaptation in a way that works and enriches the story, but they failed to do so here. The material invented to pad the story out over three nights was weak and ultimately rather pointless. Even cut down to four hours, this would still be a flawed adaptation, but it would be less flawed.
All in all, the miniseries never succeeded in establishing a consistent tone. It kept trying to make things seem ominous and suspenseful and scoring everything with scare cues, but the Overlords’ invasion and the children’s ascension were so gentle and benign that the attempts to make it feel dangerous and sinister never really worked. Especially when the human antagonists were consistently so fanatical and cartoonish. People often say this is a dark or pessimistic story, but I’ve never really found it to be such, because it’s a story of humanity ascending to become something greater. Sure, the transition is sad, in the way that letting your children grow up and leave home is always sad, but it’s not portrayed as something evil or unjust. It’s a natural transition that the Overlords make as comfortable as possible. This is what the title means. The end of childhood is the beginning of adulthood — in this case, for the human species. The irony is that it’s the grownups who are trapped in the child form of the species (because their mental patterns are too fixed to allow the transition) and the children who metamorphose into its mature form.
And the attempt to pass off that solemn and thoughtful tale as a horror story just didn’t work. At least, not for someone like me, who’s known the book since childhood. For someone coming to the story for the first time, I imagine that being set up to expect something evil and then consistently not getting it might’ve been off-putting too. It was trying too hard to pretend to be something it wasn’t. But then, maybe this was just too contemplative and nonviolent a narrative to work well on television.
A Gainax ending for everybody
Truly a horrible adaptation. Clarke’s book makes us pity the Overlords–at an evolutionary pinnacle, but unable to join with the Overmind and thus doomed to forever be excluded from transcendence. Humankind, by joining the Overmind, actually becomes integral to the Universe and there’s a sense of completeness. The adaptation turns this on its head, making humankind’s transcendence into a kind of tragedy, with Milo’s plea that humankind not be forgotten. The weak script completely blows the chance for Karellen to explain that humankind and all the beauty, all the creativity and achievements will never be forgotten because it’s all absorbed by the Overmind, while the Overlords with their fantastic science are forever stuck in the material world.
So many ways this could have been better done; so many missed opportunities (like the Jonah allusion of hiding in a whale), the chance to really see an alien world and not just fly over it, and the opportunity to discuss some philosophy between Milo and Karellen about humankind, its achievements, and its place in the Universe. The abrupt and off-note ending just symbolizes exactly what this adaptation did to Clarke’s marvelous story. It just blew up.
Great analysis Christopher, one that I can only agree with. At the end of the book, the reader is left stunned and thoughtful–what is humankind’s place in the Universe? Where are we going? Is there a purpose to everything?
At the end of this miniseries, we’re just kind of left with a shrug.
However, Charles Dance makes a marvelous Karellen. It’s too bad he got so little screen time in Part 3 and never really had the philosophic discussions with Milo (Jan in the book) that would have put everything into a better perspective. Quite honestly, the actor playing Milo just wasn’t that good or engaging. They really needed a young Denzel Washington or intense Will Smith type actor. Oh well, let’s hope this adaptation drives a few people to read the novel.
@4/Anthony: Yeah, I didn’t think Osy Ikhile was bad, exactly, but he was a little too grim, not really projecting the character’s intellectual curiosity and sense of wonder. But to be fair, that may well have been a directorial choice rather than the fault of the actor.
If I’d been adapting this, with the understanding that I’d need to compress the time frame to within a single generation, I would’ve had Jan (Milo, whatever) be the one the Overlords chose as their spokesperson, the one who became Karellen’s friend, but who still had to sneak around behind Karellen’s back to get his answers. It would’ve given the miniseries a stronger throughline if it had had the same person as the lead in the beginning that it did in the end.
sooo yes it didn’t sound like you would like this as you didn’t like the book. I didn’t find the end of the book to be depressing at all. Our children became beings of pure energy and incredibly powerful. Sounds wonderful to me. Not sure why the people left had to destroy themselves could easily have been too races. *shrug* But yes if you found the end of the book depressing you wouldn’t like this. I didn’t like it because of the changes they made, following the book more to the T would have been much better. As for joining the overmind. Sign me up today.
@6/dwcole: There couldn’t have been two races, though. The adults lost the ability to have children, so the human race would’ve died with their generation. (Which is a secondary meaning of the title. It’s the end of humanity’s childhood as it metamorphoses into its mature form, but it’s also the end of humanity’s ability to have children.) Also, once they were all gone (except Rodricks), the children consumed the Earth to fuel their ascension anyway, so there would’ve been no planet left for a human race to live on even if they could’ve continued to propagate themselves.
They couldn’t have followed the book exactly. It spanned too much time and had too many changes of viewpoint character, and a lot of it was more worldbuilding and intellectual discourse than dramatic narrative, because that’s how Clarke rolled. One way or the other, it had to be changed for the screen. It’s just that the specific way they chose to change it didn’t work that well.
In fact, people have been trying to figure out how to adapt this book to the screen for the past half-century, and none of the previous efforts have ever succeeded. Sometimes that’s been because it would’ve just been too expensive, but it’s also a difficult story to convert into a narrative. The only previous adaptation that I know of (not counting the unabridged audiobook, since that’s just a reading of the novel) was a 2-hour radio version from the BBC in 1997. (You can find it pretty easily online.) Maybe we shouldn’t be so judgmental of this version, considering all the earlier attempts that never managed to reach the screen at all.
You know, I’m sorry, but I’m going to say that’s crap. Just because it would be difficult, or unusual, does not mean that with a literary and talented director and writer it could not have been done. Rather than make excuses for their mediocrity, how about we try holding them to a higher standard?
Basically, if you’re not willing or able to do it right, don’t do it.
@7 eh … TV can do intellectual discourse well and taking that part out made it much weaker the intellectual discourse was the point here. Turning it into a horror show was also a problem as previously mentioned. Clark didn’t see it as horror that is for sure. Remember Clark was an extreme Atheist part of the point of the short story and the novel itself was how our idea of Devils is ridiculous. Been years since I read the book but I didn’t think the planet was destroyed by the ascension in the book though it is possible I missed it, I was young and the whole cosmic powers likely interested me more. I also don’t remember no one being able to have children afterward. I remember thinking at the end of the book – why did they kill themselves? But again I may have missed things. Should reread the book I think I still have my dogeared copy around here somewhere.
I do think it is telling that they waited until after Clark’s death to do this. He did not see his book as horror and wouldn’t have liked the way this portrayed it at all.
@8/NomadUK: Slavishly adapting a book to the screen is not “doing it right.” The word “adapt” means to change something to fit the requirements of a new context or circumstance. What works on the screen is very different from what works in prose, simply because they are different media. Books can be more internalized, more abstract, less visual, more detailed. A good adaptation preserves the essence of the story but adjusts its form and presentation to fit the new medium, to take advantage of its strengths and compensate for its weaknesses. Heck, that’s the whole reason for doing an adaptation to a new medium in the first place: because it lets you tell the story differently and thereby bring something new to it, something that the original couldn’t do. If you just copy it exactly, why even bother? If you want something exactly, beat-for-beat like the book, that’s what the book is for. And adaptation serves no purpose if it doesn’t add something fresh and different. Just because this particular set of changes didn’t work, that doesn’t mean that making changes in general is the problem. It just means they chose the wrong ones.
@9/dwcole: I reviewed the climactic scenes of the book earlier today. It was clearly stated that the children consumed the material of the Earth to fuel the last stage of their transformation. Jan Rodricks described the planet becoming transparent and insubstantial beneath his feet.
And they didn’t “wait” until after Clarke’s death. As I said, people have been trying to adapt this novel to the screen for half a century. But nobody’s been able to make it happen until now. For one thing, the special effects would’ve been too difficult before the age of CGI. For another, it’s not your conventional sci-fi adventure story. It’s the kind of thoughtful, intellectual story that you’d generally get in a low-budget indie film, but it’s so epic and complex in scope that it requires big-budget effects. Just convincing a studio to do a project like that would’ve been a tall order.
This project simply had the wrong director/producers behind it. Someone else, an Alex Garland, say, could have masterfully laid down the atmosphere, grandeur, mystery, dread and otherworldliness this production demanded, without resorting to cheap jumpcuts, extraneous showy effects and wooden character-icons. As it is, the presentation has left behind a high-pitched whirring noise somewhere in the background… it’s Arthur C. Clarke, spinning like a dynamo in his grave.
I’m just glad it was followed by an episode of ‘The Expanse”
ChristopherLBennet@10: You know, I think I missed the part in my comment where I called for a slavish, word-for-word adaptation of the novel.
@13/NomadUK: You quoted my post where I said “They couldn’t have followed the book exactly” and replied “that’s crap.” So it certainly sounded like you were saying they could have followed the book exactly.
I read Childhood’s End so long ago, I forget it. I don’t even remember it from watching this mini-series. But that might track. I do remember that it didn’t grab me. I don’t know why, but one can speculate. It was either uninteresting. Or I was so young (I’m almost 60 as I type this) that my mind couldn’t deal with sophisticated, deep concepts.
I generally like movies with good endings. In our manmade hell, Why would I want to be entertained with pain? This flick didn’t have a good ending, although I enjoyed the sci fi elements: the aliens, their home world (not really seen except from through their smokey hellish atmosphere) and the ship they were on.
What I did find interesting was the idea that the universe had a mind. I’m very familiar with this type of thinking. So is everyone. But not everyone thinks about what they think.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest who believed in evolution (and wasn’t unique therefore). I do not. The evidence not only doesn’t support the idea of biological evolution, but it refutes it. But believers, for many reasons, will not see that. De Chardin taught that God (which is a term he rarely used) was Omega Point, a convergence if you like, of all consciousness. He talked about two types of energy, namely tangential and radial. Evolution involves radial energy. Tangential energy has to do with the physical universe. Everything has a center and from every center, a connection exists to every other center. So many writers ( who simply decided that they would sidestep the Christian Bible’s Creator and come up with their own fancy ideas about reality) express the same idea. Marilyn Ferguson (“The Aquarian Conspiracy”), Theodore Roszack (“Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier And The Evolution Of Consciousness”) for example say the same thing, in different ways (in my opinion) that de Chardin says. They say that humankind kind evoloved from a lower life form. They say that once humankind reached a certain threshold, reflexion was was gained. Self-awareness and advanced mental activity was now present. And, crucially, something (de Chardin) came into being that was in essence the collective conscious of (living and dead) humankind. De Chardin called it the noosphere.
But it’s either the truth or it isn’t. Call me the Devil who torments people, but those who conveniently want to disregard the Creator and, in fact, replace him, for now are free to do just that. Accept that they can’t, really. What they can do is signal to God – not the universe – that they have no interest in Him or his inconvenient standards and would like to be struck from his book of life. God will force no one to live. Neither will force those who reject his standards and plan of salvation for imperfect humankind (since Adam’s rebellion) and opt instead for that wonderful organizing principle (very neconservative, it so happens) of ‘riches for the strongest’, to forever inflict torment upon others, who may or may not be like them. If He were to, He wouldn’t be a God of love. So, He has a timetable. Trying to call him out by spitting on his standards (bad behavior, including terrorism, and I’m not just talking about ISIS) won’t alter his plans or his timeline. Things are going to change. Thank God. I do.
ChristopherLBennet@14: My comment was meant to encompass that entire quote, which implied that it’s just too hard for Hollywood/television/whoever to handle plots that span lots of time, have lots of viewpoints, and have interesting things to say. That’s crap. It takes talent, determination, and a desire to rise above the level of dross, but it can be done; the talent exists. And in a world in which cable and Internet companies have become sources of entertainment the quality of which often exceeds that of Hollywood blockbusters, it’s actually not unusual.
SyFy, as it so often does, screwed the pooch, this time with one of the classics of the genre. I think the first rule of adapting a novel like Childhood’s End is reminding yourself that you’re probably not as smart or as good as Arthur C Clarke, so think really hard before changing things.
I found it nearly impossible not to compare the tv series with the book. The first problem I had is the existence of the film “2001: a Space Odyssey” which represents by Clark’s own admission a collaboration between himself and Kubrick. So obviously, Clark was understanding of the liberties that need to be taken when you interpret a novel for the big/small screen. He simply wanted his intentions as a writer to be honored.
This brings me to the second problem, which is that not only does the series absolutely disregard Clark’s vision but it does so with no payoff whatsoever. The miniseries traded elements from the original for boring stereotypes and paranoia. The premise of the original story is that humanity is poised to begin colonizing space, but space is not empty. It is already populated by its own beings with their own set of rules. So entry into space is less like imperialist takeover and more like trying to be granted citizenship. Humanity has the choice to quit the process at any time. Clark’s message, I believe, was simply about the dangers of assuming we are alone in the universe, and the danger of viewing other worlds as places to be claimed by mankind. The old idea of plant a flag and kill the natives will no longer work, so the entire history of mankind on earth won’t mean much. This is why the Overlords come to earth; to teach the new rules, so to speak. They are not threatening or menacing, and it isn’t a hostage situation. They are immigration counselors, there to make sure we speak the language, have jobs and can pass the entry exams.
Clarks original vision would have been so relevant given todays issues, I can’t understand why the miniseries changed it. It could have been an amazing tale of a changing world, where the greatest follies of mankind (slaughter of the Native Americans for example) must be abandoned to move forward as a species. Instead we got menacing aliens, angry media trying to stir the pot, a strange retelling of “the Pied Piper” and a bunch of abducted children no one agreed to give up. Honestly, it makes me sad. The book is practically free on Kindle, and its a fast read, for anyone interested.
Elizabeth
This series seriously needed a Captain Kirk (Original Series) character where he argues over and against the Overlords and the philosophy of the Overmind.
Also must thank Nomad UK for hitting the proverbial nail on the head. I completely agree with every point made. Well observed and articulated.
Elizabeth
In addition to the points above, there was some awfully painful writing moments in that mini, such as:
“This will cure anything, but it’s very hard to make, this is all there is.”
a) It completely telegraphed that he was going to use it on somebody else, because otherwise why point out in advance, “this will cure you, but that’s all there is of it”
and
b) Oh, come on. Ricky opened a vial in his cornfield and instantly people ALL OVER THE WORLD were cured of their ills. Now suddenly life-saving medical stuff is rare?
@15 um wow are you really misunderstanding the evidence if you think it refutes evolution … wow. Science works on evidence and experiment and has nothing to do with “belief”.
@16/NomadUK: You completely misunderstand what I was saying. I would never imply that a story should be dumbed down; I simply meant that what works in prose does not automatically translate well to a dramatic form. The important thing to keep in mind is that the conversation is not solely about this adaptation of Childhood’s End. Many writers have tried many times over the past five decades to adapt the novel for the screen, and none of them actually succeeded until now. And it’s absurd to assume that the failure of the previous efforts means they were all done by stupid or incompetent or lazy people. It’s easy for an armchair quarterback to assume that something is simple and that the only reason anyone could fail at it is because they’re incompetent. But that’s usually not the truth. Some things are just hard to do, even with plenty of hard work and skill and intelligence and good intentions applied to them. Now, maybe I couldn’t engage in an exhaustive and detailed exploration of the difficulties of adapting this work in a couple of sentences in an Internet comment, but that doesn’t mean those difficulties don’t exist. If Childhood’s End were not a hard story to adapt, this would probably have been at least the third or fourth adaptation that reached the screen, not the first.
@17/Elizabeth: It’s intriguing that you interpret CE as a post-colonialist allegory, because it occurred to me that the Overlords could be seen as very much an allegory for paternalistic colonialism. They come into a land populated by warlike primitives, impose peace and coerce or re-educate the natives into giving up their self-destructive habits and beliefs, give them a utopia they didn’t ask for, and eventually enable them to elevate themselves to a higher level by leaving behind everything they were before. That’s pretty much the exact way that British colonialists saw their Civilising Mission — although in real life it generally turned out far more harmfully.
If Clarke did intend that allegory — and given his nationality and generation, it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t influenced by the presence of colonialist ideology — then it’s hard to say whether he was speaking in favor of colonialism or against it. The Overlords’ imposed order does bring about the end of our distinct culture, just as the goal of the Civilising Mission was to eradicate colonized people’s cultures and religions and turn them into clones of the British. But it also enables humanity to evolve into something greater, which could be seen as a positive thing. And yet that something greater requires the subsuming of individual identity into a uniform collective, which many would consider not positive. And given that Clarke was gay at a time when being gay was actually against the law in his home country (which is why he moved to Sri Lanka, which had looser laws), perhaps he would’ve been on the side favoring individuality over conformity.
Wow, I’ve always seen the ending of the book as something more or less positive and transcendental, but maybe there’s a darker side to it than I thought.
I didn’t read the book, but to me the story’s Overmind was a sociopath all-powerful shot-caller. It was just a glorified heavyweight consumer who drove all living things to extinction on planets of it’s choosing. It never asked humans about taking the children, it just took them. Very cruel. It processed the children, then consumed them along with their their planet to become part of it’s “mind”.
As far as the Overlords go, they were just smooth-talking henchmen obeying the Overmind’s orders.
The humans were over powered by the space voddo-daddys and the were just poor saps.
Maybe in a follow up story the Overmind along with the Overlords get their ass kicked by something better, like the Nazis got it in Normandy.
Well, I don’t remember the book very well and I haven’t seen the series, but IIRC the kids ascending wasn’t something that Overmind or the Overlords actively brought about – it was where human evolution was naturally going.The Overlords only got involved because humanity was on the cusp of nuclear war and self-destruction several decades before the next step could happen.
Also, did sterilization of adults really happen in the book? IIRC, but I very well may be wrong, it was just that all kids born after a certain point were post-humans and eventually humans didn’t bother to/became too old to procreate.
And yea, I too never understood Rodericks spending so little time on the Overlord planet and returning. I mean, if everything is gone anyway, why not spend your life learning and exploring?
@23/John: Your interpretation suggests that the miniseries wasn’t effective at conveying the ambiguities of the book. The premise of the book was that all species with telepathic potential would either evolve into part of the universal collective consciousness (the Overmind) or would unleash a destructive “mind cancer” of sorts that would jeopardize intelligent life in the cosmos, and that the Overlords were sent to prevent the latter and facilitate the former. It wasn’t some arbitrary thing that the Overmind forced on a species; it was the evolutionary path of all species with telepathic potential, and the Overlords were just there to shepherd along the inevitable process and ensure it happened as positively as beneficially as possible. Karellen (at least in the miniseries) used the analogy of midwives — they were there to guide the birth of the next stage of humanity and ensure it happened as safely and comfortably as possible. Though it’s occurred to me that, from the perspective of the adult humans, they could be seen more as hospice workers, tending to a species in its final days and helping make the inevitable end as peaceful and painless as possible.
So the Overmind wasn’t a single entity, it was the collective mental community of all higher intelligences. It didn’t cause extinctions that would’ve otherwise been avoided; humanity’s evolution into a higher mind was going to happen one way or the other, but it could happen either positively or destructively, and so the community of minds sent the Overlords to guide the process and ensure it came out positively. (Or at least that’s what Karellen believed. I suppose there’s room for the interpretation that he was himself being misled by the Overmind.)
This is sort of what I was saying before about the miniseries relying too much on scare beats and ominous music and trying to make this a horror story. I don’t think Clarke was going for anything like that. It was more ambiguous and subtle than that.
I enjoy the reviews here of CE since im a huge fan of AC. What do you all think of the adaption of John Carter of Mars to the screen? Or, could you point me to those reviews? ty
@26/ironfortress: You’re probably asking about Tor.com’s review of John Carter, but for what it’s worth, here’s my own. In short, I loved it. I think it was a superb piece of filmmaking and a worthy adaptation, though I think it was hurt by its weak opening scenes and vague title. I’m really disappointed that it bombed, because it deserved sequels.
Between Against the Fall of Night and Childhood’s End, A.C. Clarke’s vision informed much of my early teenage worldview of humanity. Sadly, SciFi’s (I refuse to use their horrid spelling) lackluster adaptation of Childhood’s End left me longing for what might have been. I think Elizabeth nailed it pretty well with her comments (17). Myself, I wonder if anyone on the production crew actually read the novel or if they skimmed the Wikipedia article and lifted some names and general situations. There wasn’t much of Clarke’s story in this lifeless corpse of a thing.
@ChristopherLBennet and Landsmen, thank you for the responses. Very appreciated; the former thought-provoking, the latter I just had to shake my head because no one in charge of the production likely read the novel.
I have read this book several times, including once right before the series aired just to refresh my memory. Clark’s work is remarkably fast to read. As an author, he conveys complex ideas using simple language. He may be the best science fiction author in this regard, literally. Anyone who can read a newspaper can get through a Clark novel in a few hours.
The challenge is that the reader is left to decide how he or she feels about the story. Clark is remarkable in his objectivity as a fiction writer. I do not believe he was for or against the events in ‘Childhood’s End’ or any of his works. Personally, I think the novel is based upon reason. First, given the vastness of the universe, if life exists in one place (Earth) the odds are overwhelming that life exists elsewhere. So the human-centric notion that we are alone in the universe is both foolish and dangerous. Dangerous because when, not if, we encounter extra-terrestrial life, there are once again overwhelming odds that at least one sentient species will be far more advanced than the human race in every way. Encountering this species will require a choice, much like that outlined by ChristopherLBennet regarding imperialism. One important thing to note in that comparison is that we find them by going into the place they already inhabit. They do not come to us. It is a subtle but important distinction, I believe, that we are not invaded. Humanity is at a tipping point when the Overloards arrive. The human race will inevitably begin to leave earth to find other places to inhabit. Imperialism serves as a good metaphor for me once again, only imagine it turned on its head. The Native Americans build a boat and sail to seventeenth century London. What choices do they face? Ask to be accepted as Londoners or flee back to their homeland and pray they are not followed.
Regarding the Overloards and the nature of humanity’s choice, I have always felt Miles to be critical to understanding the perspectives of the alien beings through human eyes. The scene where Miles views the Overloards’ world is one I have always considered tremendously important. Miles doesn’t merely observe that their planet is like hell, he realizes that if humanity makes the same choice as the Overloards the earth will become our hell. The human race would be a relic trapped on earth, forced to adapt into monstrous forms just to survive the changes, both natural and man made, to the environment. I think that it is exceptional that Miles essentially gives his life to learn the truth; these alien beings are not gods, they are imperfect, but they are genuinely attempting to help the human race. I’ve always seen Miles as incredibly brave because he can overcome his own bias when presented with new information. He points out the human error of cherry picking facts based on emotion. In the world created by Clark, thinking this way, in terms of the past and habits and what is comfortable, will be fatal. Miles is an example of how one should approach the unknown; an ideal. Maybe it is weak from a writing perspective, but I’m not sure Clark’s goal was so much to emotionally engage the reader as to present a fully formed theory of something that could happen without forcing suspension of belief.
Elizabeth
@28 & 29: It’s never fair to assume that the makers of an adaptation “didn’t read the novel” just because they didn’t interpret it the way you wanted or include the elements you expected. And it makes no sense as a criticism. They probably wouldn’t have tried to make this if they hadn’t cared about the novel. As I pointed out before, people have been trying hard to get this novel to the screen for half a century now, and these are the first people who actually pulled it off. It stands to reason that they must have worked hard at it and cared enough to make it happen, whether or not we agree with the approach they took and the decisions they made.
It’s clear to me that they were indeed familiar with the book. They got Karellen almost entirely right. They included most of the major story threads and characters, even if they changed them radically and took them in different directions. They included key lines from the book, although often in different contexts. Yes, they made a lot of changes, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t know what they were changing. Writing for the screen is a process of change, and it’s not uncommon for the final result to evolve into something very different from the starting point — not because the creators were unfamiliar with the source, but because they made a long series of decisions about what to change and how to shape a new story using the source as a starting point, and sometimes that journey leads so far from the beginning that the end result is hardly recognizable. And sometimes those changes work well (cf. Blade Runner) and sometimes they don’t. But it doesn’t mean the creators didn’t work hard or exercise due diligence. It just means they had a different idea of what the book meant and what aspects of it they should stress.
@29/Elizabeth: “Miles doesn’t merely observe that their planet is like hell, he realizes that if humanity makes the same choice as the Overloards the earth will become our hell.”
No, that’s not right at all. First of all, in the book, the Overlords’ planet isn’t as hellish as in the show; it simply happens to be under a red star and thus has a red-lit appearance. It’s not a bad place to live, it’s just alien. Even in the miniseries, it’s never stated that the Overlords find it hellish. Second, there is no “choice” to be made. Neither humanity nor the Overlords had the choice to become like the other. Humanity was a species with telepathic potential and the ability to evolve into a collective consciousness, which would become inevitable. The Overlords had no telepathic potential and were thus trapped at the pinnacle of their own evolution. (And no, evolution does not work that way, but that was the premise of the book.)
@@@@@25/ ChristopherLBennett Thank you for your reply. Maybe I identify too much with the humans who had their kids taken away just like that. That’s not to mention the kids’ older brothers and sisters also suffering in distress. As a parent myself, the idea of my kids taken away from me by whoever for whatever reason so that I never saw them again would be violently traumatic. It would not be a kind or peaceful thing. In fact, if I could, I would seek vengence against the Overmind because the hurt would be so great. But also they have the whole living Earth destroyed, with all it’s beauty and wonder. So to me, in this story, no matter how enlightened the Overmind thinks it is, to me it’s just a glorified Nazi or a glorified but callous corporate board of directors. Maybe my hatred for it would be as futile as Captain Ahab’s vs. the Great White Whale, but it would only grow in me anyway. On the other hand, maybe the Overmind doesn’t mind being hated by a primitive being.
@31/John: But the problem is, that all assumes that these were things that could’ve been avoided, that the Overmind chose for them to happen. That’s not what the book says. It was inevitable that humanity would begin experimenting with telepathy and would unleash their potential to evolve into a higher metaconsciousness. Past experience had shown that, if unchecked and unguided, that process would lead to the emergence of a destructive mental “cancer” that could endanger life throughout the galaxy before it inevitably collapsed into its own extinction. But if nurtured and guided, it would happen safely and the evolved form of humanity would survive. But either way, it was impossible for humanity to remain in its original form. Its only options were to evolve badly and destroy itself and take others along with it, or to be nurtured and shepherded through the process so that it would achieve a successful transcendence and live on in its evolved form.
Again, consider the title. Childhood’s End. Nobody gets to stay a child forever. It always ends. The premise of the book is that the life we know is merely the immature form of the human species, and that the time would come for us to grow up. People who go through adolescence without adult guidance can become chaotic, dysfunctional, and destructive to themselves and others, but those who are helped through their maturation by adult society can go on to become healthy and successful adults. Either way, childhood ends; it’s just a question of what comes next.
And it was the children themselves who destroyed the Earth. They had to consume its matter in order to fuel the final stage of their ascension, just as a chick has to consume the nutrients within its egg before it can hatch. Again, it wasn’t optional or arbitrary, but was an inevitable part of a naturally occurring process.
So the Overmind (that is, the community of all higher minds in the universe) didn’t cause any of this; it just helped an inevitable process to happen safely. Blaming it for the change is like blaming hospice workers for the deaths of their patients. They don’t kill their patients; they tend to people whose death is inevitable and try to make sure it happens peacefully. They’re trying to make the best of an unfortunate inevitability, something that’s just part of how life works and isn’t anyone’s fault.
At least, that’s the way the Overmind explained it to the Overlords. As I said before, it’s conceivable that the Overlords were misled. But there’s no evidence of that in the book.
Maybe the miniseries confused the issue by introducing an analogy between the Overmind and God, suggesting that God is what intelligent life collectively evolves into and forms. Westerners tend to think of God as a single, personified entity that causes things to happen — that “takes” people when it’s time for them to die. So that may have encouraged the perception that the Overmind was making this happen, rather than directing an inevitable process to happen in the safest and healthiest way possible.
I did not read the book. What confused me is that Milo was gone for 85 years yet when he comes back the little girl Jennifer is still at the top of the mountain doing the same thing she was doing when he left?
And 85 years later he comes back just minutes before the earth explodes?
I guess I am just not getting that. I did not like the end at all.
@33/confused: Yeah, they streamlined things a great deal in the miniseries. In the book, the children did mature into a collective of largely undifferentiated members, even looking increasingly alike as they aged. Jeff and Jennifer Anne were the first evolved children, but there was nothing special about either of them beyond that; Jennifer wasn’t a singular nexus for them all. (Presumably the miniseries made that change to keep the story more focused on the characters we’d already met, in the same way part 1 conflated Wainwright with the more extremist member of his organization who kidnapped Stormgren.) And Rodricks lived as the last man on Earth for 5-6 years before the end came.
I do think the ending of this story is quite dark and depressing. I don’t think there’s anything “natural” about the “evolution” of human beings in the story. Nor do I have any good things to say about Overlords or an Overmind who would destroy the Earth and the human race with basically a Trojan horse. It was a deception and it robbed human beings of their unique humanity.
@35/Jack: I guess it depends on how willing you are to accept the conceit of psi powers as a natural human ability and the evolution to an incorporeal or collective consciousness as the ultimate endpoint for intelligent species. There’s a lot of SF that makes that assumption, including Star Trek and Stargate. (Plus there’s the whole Star Child thing in Clarke’s 2001/2010.) The idea of collective consciousness as a positive thing had a fair amount of currency in the ’60s and ’70s as well, if not earlier. Maybe the popularity of ST:TNG and the Borg has led us to see collective consciousness as a more malevolent thing.
As I’ve said, I think the meaning is right there in the title. The end of childhood is neither all good nor all evil. It’s just a change, a bittersweet transition that entails both gain and loss. We only see what humanity loses in the transformation because we get left behind and don’t get to see what it gains. If Clarke had meant it to be unambiguously evil, I don’t think he would’ve chosen that title.
The title doesn’t justify anything. The Overlords suckered everyone into accepting their guiding dominion promising peace and plenty, beneath the shadow of their implied threat.. But they left out the maybe important information that within a few short years this will result in the annihilation of the earth and the human race as we know it. The devil is in the details. No one would have agreed to this, but free will was abolished.
And again, this was not a “natural evolution”. Would this have happened naturally eventually? Through human trials and tribulations, in 10,000 years, 100,000 years? Maybe, who knows? Who cares when we have a bunch of brainwashed thugs deceiving everyone and forcibly shoving a poor pregnant woman into a room with Beezelbub and a cosmic Ouija board. We can skip all that.
@37/Jack: The miniseries’s version of the Ouija board scene is enormously unlike the one in the book. I think the miniseries did give more of an impression of coercion than was really accurate, and I think the idea was to misdirect, to make the Overlords seem more malevolent than they really were. But the later explanation was perhaps inadequately conveyed in proportion to the earlier attempts to make them scary.
According to the book, it was inevitable that humans’ psychic research would lead them to change within the next few generations, and that races that had been allowed to do so in the past had all but inevitably unleashed something devastatingly destructive. So the only way to prevent that and protect life in the galaxy was to pre-empt the process and guide it along a safer route. So yes, there was some loss of free choice, but nobody had a choice, because it was an inevitable process, it sucked for everyone, and this was the least worst outcome. At least, that was what Karellen believed, the way the Overmind justified it. I can see how it could be read as a deception, but that’s hardly the only possible reading of the text. I’ve always seen it as a story about a sad inevitability, about an attempt to make the best of a bad situation. Karellen doesn’t like what he has to do, but he believes there’s no other way to prevent a far more horrible outcome for humanity and others in the universe. And he didn’t tell humanity about the imminent changes because that foreknowledge of an inescapable fate would have only provoked chaos and terror and despair. (A lot of apocalyptic stories ask this question: If nothing can be done to prevent the end, then is it better to tell people the end is coming or let them live out their days in blissful ignorance?) He just tried to make humanity’s final generations as peaceful as possible, like a hospice worker with a terminal patient.
I never read the book but will now. Thr film was not great except charles dance but the idea behind it is brilliant. One thing though.what happened to rachael? Uf the humans got to live out their lives then how was it a young version that milo saw on the ship? Of was it a copy the overlords created?