Years ago, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. It was very, very good. But I never got around to reading anything else by him nor felt much driven to do so. Wasn’t my style. When it comes to science fiction, I like my space opera and that’s just not Clarke’s thing.

But Childhood’s End kept coming up as being one of those books one really ought to read if one read much sci fi at all. So I picked it up for something like $1 at a library book sale around the corner from my home here in DC and finally got around to reading it the other week.

Clarke writes what one might call sociological science fiction. He’s not particular interested in individual characters and their relationships with each other, so far as I can tell, except as necessary to move the sociological (or anthropological, if you prefer) questions that really interest him.

Childhood’s End does present an interesting scenario. A highly advanced alien race shepherds the human race as we move towards our next stage of evolution, which is essentially a group mind, living, depending on how you look at it, either outside of space-time or within space-time but able to experience it as a whole. The aliens are actually unable to make that evolutionary leap themselves. They are rather like a people who have knowledge of heaven and who can show others the way, but will never be able to reach it themselves. So once one gets through all the stuff before the final 20% or so, a kind of melancholia permeates it all (increased by presenting to view of the last human, watching his former fellow humans become something else while he stays behind, so to speak).

Childhood’s End is not on my top ten or top twenty-five list for science fiction. It might be in my top hundred. I don’t know because I’m far too lazy to figure out a top one hundred list. But it’s good.