I picked up Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End for the first time since my early teens. It is interesting to read now and being sensitive to a story about aliens coming to uplift the natives of the earth, ending their warring ways and imposing new political structures and giving technology. There is a funny little throwaway line about how the Overlords end fighting in South Africa: “the next day the government of South Africa announced that full rights would be restored to the white minority.” This was published in 1953, so at the dawn of apartheid proper, and it is unclear now whether it comments on apartheid or white anxiety about the natives taking over.
The utopianism of this era’s science fiction is also remarkable, with the UN as the undisputed world government, with Europe coming together in peace, with all humanity, with the exception of some bad apples, having their faces towards a common future. It helps, perhaps, that this world is led by white sons of the Enlightenment from the United States, Britain or northern Europe and there is little or no room for anyone else to speak – why should there be?
It’s stil an enjoyable book, fortunately I can recognise what I am reading without finding it unreadable.