Throwback Thursday: Childhood’s End Is the Definitive First Contact Story

Impossible to film?
Syfy’s ambitious television adaptation of the novel is out on DVD this week, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It’s not an easy book to adapt, though on the surface, it seems like low-hanging fruit: a first contact story employing a familiar trope (although in 1953 it was a pretty radical concept), the benevolent, technologically superior aliens take over the planet in a peaceful coup. Our new, gentler overlords usher in an apparent golden age, but one with dark undertones. For one, the beings resemble nothing more than the demons of various cultural iconographies, leading some to speculate that humankind had a less-than-beneficial run-in with them in our deepest, most primitive past. For another, during the the “golden age,” humanity’s march of progress seems to have stagnated, prompting some to resist.
While this might seem like an easy adaptation, packed with choice imagery (huge spaceships, advanced tech, aliens that look like demons), it’s actually very difficult stuff, partly because there’s almost zero action. Clarke’s story is very interior—for good reason—and its pleasures are philosophical, not visceral. Any script that’s true to the novel is guaranteed a slam-dunk opening sequence…followed by a series of conversations. The Syfy version tried to mine drama out of beefing up the human conflict and ramping up the ominous overtones of the “invasion.” Whether it makes for good TV is up for debate, but is an undeniable departure from the source text. I think it has much to recommend—not the least of which is a captivating starring turn by Charles Dance—but its hard to argue with six decades’ status as a stone-cold SF lit classic.

A great concept … or the greatest concept?
Two things about the book blew my young mind. One, the ultimate twist is incredible: (spoilers for a 60-year-old novel!) that the Overlords are themselves merely servants of the Overmind, a collective consciousness that employs them to guide species on the verge of the final step into “biological adulthood,” leave their physical bodies behind, and join a universal spiritual collective. Clarke builds up the Overlords as a formidable alien force with incomprehensible technology—only to reveals that it means nothing. The Overlords, for all their power, are merely servants of an intelligence that has no need for power.
But what really made me put the book down and stare off into the near distance for a few years was the other twist: as the final generation of human children move into the next stage of evolution and prepare to join the Overmind, only one “classic” human being remains. He asks for an explanation of what happened between humanity and the Overlords in the past that prompted us to use their appearance to signify the ultimate evil. The Overlords explain that nothing happened in the past—the memory was past backwards from the future through a racial premonition. Humanity felt a ripple backwards in time from the moment when the Overlords’ arrival, which signaled the end of existence as they knew it.
In a word: Whoa.
More than 60 years on, Childhood’s End remains vibrant, the fundamentals of the story still brilliant, and disturbingly possible. We don’t know what the “next stage” of human life will be like, whether it will be a natural transformation or something like the singularity. All I know is, if aliens that look like Satan show up and start tossing cancer cures from their massive spaceships, it’s time to hit that “eat, drink, and be merry” button hard.