I finished Childhood’s End. What a great book, proper classic science fiction and better written and thought through than anything most other writers of that period ever managed.
Of course, a few pages after I wrote yesterday’s blogpost, the only real character (to the extent there are any characters) turned out to be a young black man. I stand by the old fashioned racial politics, though; Jan’s race is mentioned only once (‘the young Negro’) and otherwise he is interchangeable with all the other white middle class male scientists and explorers in Clarke’s works.
It had the classic SF sense of wonder – the journey under the sea, the skipping from world to world (one of which must have inspired Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem), the sense of a purpose and drive towards something better and more transcendent that was common to many writers from that period and that Clarke brought to apotheosis. There is nothing that exemplifies the shift from modernity to post-modernity like the evolution of science fiction.