Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

• Reviews

• Books
• Arthur C. Clarke

Aliens arrive on Earth, and they seem friendly.

• Publisher: Del Rey
• Format: Free on Audible, read by Eric Michael Summerer

Childhood’s End seems like thinly-disguised atheist propaganda so far :) The audiobook is decently read though.

“He was being super cautious,” is a phrase that Arthur C. Clarke apparently wrote in the 1950s, starting GenZ as we know it. (I rewound and listened 3 times to make sure I heard it right.)

It’s an okay story. Probably would have been a lot better if I’d read it in 1953 before having seen the thousand other books/movies inspired by it. Kind of morphed from science fiction into pure pseudoscience there toward the end though.

I was most interested to observe his writing style seems very “timeless.” These days you expect most books to have grammar structures and word choices that give away and even depend on the pop culture era in which it was written, but his word choices were extremely concise and non-referential, so it didn’t sound dated at all.