Childhood's End: Out of the Mouths of Babes...World Annihilation. Aww!

Picture this: It's 1952, and you're Arthur C. Clarke, the Science Fiction writer. You're an f-ing genius. But you're also like, totally cool about it, which makes you even more awesome.

Pretty much everything's a mess at home. The US and Korea are bombing and killing the heck out of each other, people are getting nuke-happy with the newfangled hydrogen bomb, and worst of all, Guiding Light just began its harrowing journey to become the longest running waste of time ever to drain the collective intellect of American society. Sucks. Totally.

Now, if you were a normal 1950s lad, you'd probably be depressed about all this and drown your sorrows in a chocolate milkshake or a slice of Wonder Bread or something. But you're not normal, you're Arthur C. Clarke. Instead, you write a book called Childhood's End and scare the leftover bejezus out of everybody. Whatever. You don't care. They deserve it. You're an f-ing genius.

People found Childhood's End scary mostly because of how possible it seemed (and still does). We're shown a vision of the future not so different from our own, where just when we're on the verge on discovering something useful about outer space, a whole fleet of giant spaceships come gliding down on top of every major city on the planet (Clarke was the first one to do this, keep in mind...*ahem*IndependenceDay) and broadcasts a message in perfect English to every radio transmitter on Earth (*ahem*Hitchiker'sGuidetoTheGalaxy) to say "Be cool, my babies" and proceed to fix, throughout a generation, all the awful crap that humans have done to the world.

War? Gone.
Poverty? Fini.
Crime? Pretty much non-existent.
Cold toilet seats in the morning? Still around, but hey, you can't have it all.

Anyway, after a while things get really good and everyone's happy. 20 hour work weeks, self-driving cars, free higher education, the works. Naturally, people become boring. They watch an average of 3 hours a day watching television (unimaginable in 1952, but sadly the reality of today) and generally no one comes up with anything new and awesome to add to society (salad shooters have gone the way of the dodo).

But hey! No biggie right? Things are way cool. But somehow, there are those who get the feeling of forboding...like something bad is about to happen...

Could they be right?

If you want to know, keep reading.* If you want to find out for yourself, stop now.

Tastiness: Clever and surprising, like those peppers in Chinese take-out that make your mouth on fire.
Special Sauce: The master of SF shall not be questioned.
Recommend? The aliens told me to.


* All the children under 10 years old in the world suddenly become highly evolved, super-intelligent zombie beings that all get together and look all weird and freaky until all the older people die or kill themselves in a fit of laziness and then the super-intelligent zombie kids decide they're kinda hungry and eat the world before going off into the universe to join some god-mind thing and party. The end.

** Okay look, I don't understand it completely either. Read it for yourself.