“Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clarke: My Review

I just finished this book and I decided to write this review and publish it somewhere online. I picked this book by googling something like “the best sci fi books”. I don’t remember whether I have ever read anything by Arthur C. Clarke before. I am starting to implement the mandatory strategy where I read every day for 1 hour in the evenings, and I can read either fiction or nonfiction. I don’t think that I’ve been reading a lot of fiction books within the last several years. The previous book I read was “Rich Dad Poor Dad’’ by Robert Kiyosaki. I am doing this 1-hour routine because I decided to focus on writing about digital marketing for my own blog and for commercial customers. I need to read in order to gradually improve my writing skills. And this is how I arrived at the first page of this book.

Impact of the book on me

And I think that this book changed me a bit. I am not a religious person, but I do believe that there are some things going on that are hard to explain with science. And “Childhood’s end” basically communicates the fact that there are things that are very hard to explain with science. There might be some other beings who live in other dimensions or maybe who live in other galaxies who communicate with us telepathically. I like the general flow of such ideas, and I find them interesting. I think that I might find them interesting because they help me remind myself that there are some things that I don’t completely understand and that’s why I don’t have to feel so miserable about my life. And I don’t like the state of affairs in my life as of now, and I am taking certain steps in order to improve the quality of life for me.

I watched the TV shows based on this book a couple of years ago, but I literally don’t remember anything from that TV show. This clearly points to the fact that TV shows don’t go deep into our psyche and they aren’t capable of enriching our vision as books are. I think that I was basically consuming that TV show while I was having dinners so that I would have something tasty to consume. At the same time, I think that a lot of people who read books regularly don’t allow the information to go deep into their heads either. The information kinda passes through their brains — it goes in and then it goes out.

The book gets pretty depressing at the end because, well, humankind stops existing. When the new race cocoons out of the children, the other folks stop getting kids. It’s like they are completely desperate and depressed. They don’t see any point in continuing their race.

Of course, by that time, we are feeling the blanket control of the overmind over everything in this universe. The overmind was tracking the development path of the civilization of the overlords before contacting them and turning them into the race of PAs.

Living in the universe, imagined in the book, would be pretty depressive. I think that the author was pretty depressed about his life, and he was at the point when he didn’t see much point into taking any actions or trying to improve his life in any way. The reason for that might be his age. I don’t want to sound “non-politically correct”, but we all understand that the older you get, the less energy you have. you can get pretty depressed when you are 60. I don’t know how old the author was when he was writing this book, but it feels like that he was over 60.

Going deeper and more raw here, I can presume that the author wasn’t getting any coitus anymore. I don’t think that it’s a rude or obscene thing to say about this book in this review. I think that I am entitled to my opinion. And I think that whenever the folks top getting coitus, they might get pretty depressed pretty fast.

And this is what we might be seeing in this book. It’s possible that the author was around 60, and he wasn’t getting any action in the sack anymore. Plus, he and the wife got several kids in their mid-twenties. By the time of writing, the kids would be 35 years old and they would be bringing up their own kids.

My point is that the author is communicating to us that humanity bore the new race, and then it gradually died off. Might it be the case that the author is vocalizing that he is humanity and that he is fading away, while his kids persist and develop.

I mean those creatures were super-powerful. If I were them, I would surely be able to somehow allow humanity to continue existing on the planet, have fun and persist. Just “fading them off” is very cruel, in my point of view.

But, at the same time, the author is clearly communicating that there are two paths in this imagined universe — you can either become like the overlords who can’t procreate, or you can become like the overmind where the individual psyches are combined together into the collective mind.

Are we being prepared for the first contact like the humankind in the book?

Of course, all of this is science fiction, but I really like the point that there have been many various sci-fi movies and books over the last decades, that it’s clear that the humankind is having some thoughts on the aliens and the related context. Might it be the case that the world is being slowly prepared for the first contact that occurs in a couple of decades? Might it be that the aliens/our governments clearly understand that any revelations as to the existence of aliens would result in a complete discombobulating of the humankind as we know it. And if the measures are taken in order to ingratiate the ideas about the aliens and other related concepts into the folks’ minds, this would ease the first-contact process.

Science fiction and me

I really don’t read a lot of sci-fi books, but I only consume stupid movies and even stupider TV shows. I am currently developing my own blog about digital marketing and I am also writing a bit for commercial customers in this niche. In digital marketing, I don’t have to imagine anything and I just need to provide the detailed reports on a specific concept or a specific SaaS. What I like about this niche is that I always know what is expected from me. It’s much easier to habitat here as compared to more creative domains like sales copywriting.

I am not a native speaker. I am not sure whether you can glean this from my writing. To be honest, I think that if you are reading books and writing reviews, you are supposed to get it from the first several paragraphs. My vocabulary is pretty limited, in many cases I use super-basic grammar structures and I sound like somebody who’s learning English.

And this is great for me. The more akward and stupid my writing comes off, the better. Because this means that I am writing something, and I am writing something that is outside my comfort zone. I know with a complete certainty that after doing an activity for some time, I will be able to optimize processes and improve the final output. Thus, I am teaching myself to write in English.

I know that this sounds stupid, but I think that I want to comment on the fact that this book was written in the middle of the 20th century and the English in it isn’t the English that you are supposed to find in today’s books. And today is 2021. The English in 1950 was more dry, more on-point and more clear. It wasn’t supposed to be super sweet and pleasant to read.

And, well, the finale of the book sucks big time. The author isn’t trying to please the audience, but he tries to communicate his thoughts. Well, I don’t like the author’s thoughts — I don’t like the fact that humanity stops existing. I am a member of humanity and I don’t want it to stop existing.

The author doesn’t care that much how the readers will receive his ideas. He just writes out his thoughts and moves forward with his life. I am not sure whether this was done in this manner because Arthur C. Clarke was super-popular at the time of writing, or because he was writing in this manner, but it’s clear that it’s very different from the way that the books are currently written.

At the same time, I don’t read a lot of modern books, so it might be very difficult for me to understand how the books are written today. I just have a very good understanding that when you write blogs, you should be very on-point, you should never write a lot of your personality into an article, and you should never go on a tangent because of the SEO-related considerations.

Of course, we are supposed to use literature as a mirror so that we can look deeper into our own internal world and better understand our thoughts and emotions. Whenever we start doing this, we will be able to learn more about ourselves. And importantly, while we are doing this, we might be creating our personality. For instance, before reading this book, I wasn’t thinking that much about the Englishes of the 1950-s and of today. Now, I am thinking about this topic. While I am thinking about it, I am creating an opinion on this point. This means that there’s now an opinion inside my internal world on some concept that wasn’t there before. This means that the stack of opinions I own grows, and this means that I am growing into a more opinionated individual. You just can’t have an opinion about the two Englishes of the 1950-s and of today without first researching this topic and gaining insights about its mechanics.

And I think that I can find some synchronicities between the two Englishes and my own English. It looks like humanity has been learning to use English in order to reach the goals they set forth for themselves at that specific point. I mean, English is just a tool and it’s not the end-goal. And thus any changes in the working of society are supposed to have an effect on English. Thus, for instance, the introduction of various technologies, such as the Internet, smartphones, cryptocurrencies, AR/VR, are expected to result in the English language getting some certain new words which just didn’t exist there before. And it’s not just about the words but it’s much more about the real-life concepts that exist in the reality around us. The more diverse our environment, the more diverse and versatile the language is expected to be so that we can successfully handle challenges and reach our goals as we are moving forward. I am learning English and my writing can be pretty raw and non-very-native-like at this time, but I believe that after writing for a couple of months for my own blog, reviewing books and for commercial customers, I would be able to get much better.

In the similar fashion, if the author were an immortal and he were rewriting the books every year in order to adjust and adapt to the changing circumstances, he might have decided to replace the ending with a much more happier one by now because the life on this plant is getting more and more better and we are learning to solve lots of our problems. Of course, there are a lot of problems that persist in emerging and developing countries, but it doesn’t mean that the world isn’t moving forward. It is. We don’t have the unimaginable famines that were a frequent occurrence during the previous centuries, we don’t have devastating wars and the world seems to be much more interlinked and collaborative than during the Cold War.

At the same time, the threat of the nuclear war is clearly in the air. In the book, the author solves this problem pretty fast, saying that there was no effect on the nuclear rocket on one of the ships when that rogue nation decided to attack. The supervisor never even gave out any comment about it. This was very demoralising to that nation, and the government there collapsed soon.

So, my problem with the current world is that there’s still a high risk of nuclear war. Not a nuclear attack, but the globe-wide nuclear war. A nuclear attack of any specific nation-state would be devastating and it would be a real catastrophe, but we need to compare things in order to choose the lesser of the two evils. If we don’t, we are going to start worrying about the slightest problem and we’ll never be able to move forward with the development journey. Our reality is toxic and it slowly kills us…

That’s why I would be super-happy if the current nations decided to start negotiations for the overall disarmament of the nuclear warheads in order to decrease the risk of the global nuclear armageddon.

And it would be amazing to find out — in a couple of decades — that there was already a race of grey alliances supervising our planet at this time, who were slowly cajoling our governments toward the overall nuclear disarmament. Because, let’s be clear, wars are bad, lots of things are bad, but the worst thing ever is the planet-wide nuclear war. Should a local war or a global war arise, it will result in thousands or millions of deaths, but should the globe-wide nuclear war occur, it might turn into an extinction-level event.

Great filter scenarios

When the overlords are talking with Jan closer to the end of the book, they clearly tell him that without their interference, humanity would have destroyed it. This is a very important point because this is a clear reference to the great filter that gotta be existing in our galaxy/universe. It’s clear that there gotta exist other civilizations just like ours throughout the vast expanses of our galaxy/universe. And it’s clear that they gotta be able to travel very fast across those vast expanses, probably using the warp drive.

However, we don’t see any of them around. There’s total silence without any signals or signs of other intelligent civilizations. And, thus, there are several potential scenarios for what’s going on here.

One, we are the only civilization in the universe, and maybe even the only manifestation of life out there. At this point in my life and after writing all of those thoughts above, this scenario seems completely ludicrous. No less than ludicrous that the past beliefs that the world was rotating around the Earth.

Second, a lot of other civilizations pop up but they somehow don’t go over the great filter and they never get the capabilities to travel the distances between the solar system. I don’t think that this is an option because if one such civilization was possible, it would surely seed lots of other worlds. Thus there would be a ton of other civilizations around. So, this scenario is out.

Third, we live in the zoo or the quarantine. The aliens learned about our species 100,000 year ago. There’s some global pact galaxy-wide that the federation of worlds should not interfere in the development of the species in any way until they get nukes. All they can do is to completely conceal their existence and just supervise the course of the species’ development.

Whenever the nukes have been developed, the supervisors should start talking to the civilization’s leadership, slowly explaining to them the galaxy-wide code of conduct and policies. The governments should kick off the gradual indoctrination programme so that the general pop is ready for the arrival in 100 years.

This is exactly what the overlord did in the book, and this is exactly what many sci-fi books/movies talk about. The point is that we are intelligent beings. We aren’t worms. I don’t have anything against worms, in case there’s somewhere a powerful worm civilization whose reps are currently reading this text. But the point is that the Earth worms aren’t able to use radio and nukes. So they aren’t intelligent in the way that we are. The marker of intelligence should be pretty universal around the galaxy — it’s ability to leave the planet’s atmosphere and safely go back. Gagarid did that. I haven’t heard about any worms doing that.

Thus, say, there are two categories of civilizations: Category 1 and Category 2. Category 1 is anybody who can’t travel outside of the planet’s atmosphere on their own will, and Category 2 is anybody who can. Thus, we are Category 2.

Me being who I am, I immediately go into the mode where I develop business processes, set up goals and KPIs, then monitoring processes. This is how my brain works. This is how every human’s brain works.

And this is how every sentient being’s mind should be working. The ability to create plans, monitor and adjust them, and create the new plans after you’ve reached the original goals should be the universally implemented market of intelligence.

Thus, if I were a representative of an alien race, I would conceal my existence and I would slowly introduce myself. This is how our anthropologists act whenever they come in contact with newly discovered Amazon tribes.

In this vein, it’s possible that all our books/movies about science-fiction books aren’t something super-weird or original. It’s just our own way to come to terms with the reality around us. If we were aliens, this is how we would behave. Thus, if there are aliens out there, this is how they would be behaving themselves right now. They wouldn’t just land on the White House lawn, they would take it slow. They know — from the past experience — that any swift moves can result in very negative consequences for our species.

Why would they care about us?

It’s not that they care about our species specifically. It’s just that there are, say, 1,000 civilizations in our galaxy. The federation botched the revelation with 10 of them, which resulted in the complete demise of those civilizations. They disintegrated.

There was, for instance, a world with a 1 trillion fish-like intelligent creatures swimming around a planet with the size of our sun. When the aliens came and just said “hi fishes”, the civilization collapsed, and in 1 year, there were only 10,000 fishes left. That’s a very bad turn of events for that civilization.

The aliens weren’t happy with it, because those specific aliens are benevolent and not malevolent, right? So, they continued talking with the remaining fishes. Gradually, the fishes got it, they started rebuilding their civilization. In 2,000 years, there’ll be a trillion fish again. But, now, they have all kinds of tech including warp drives, flying saucers and various shiny objects to play with.

There are zooms with 1,000 civilizations. 2 years ago the federation discovered the humans who have 4 billions of them on that planet. Those benevolent aliens don’t want to make the same mistake again. Plus, the fishes are very riled about it — they clearly communicate that the federation should create the clear rules on engagement so that the revelation is done in a correct way. Should it be done in an optimized manner, this would enable the federation to avoid a drastic reduction in the human population from 6 billion to 10,000.

Now, if you botch a business for a sufficient amount of time, you gotta learn from your mistakes and you gotta start optimizing your process with each new iteration.

And this is what might be happening with us and our aliens. And this is what’s happening with the book’s humans and their aliens.

It’s possible that this sequence of action is as logical as rotation of planets around suns. This is how it’s done, and this is how it’s supposed to be done.

Importantly, the actual relations between various species is of little importance. It doesn’t matter whether the supervising species is cloning us because they want to populate this planet, or whether we are their food, their soul vessels, their batteries or their experimentation lab. For all we know, our civilization might be somebody’s third-grade extra-curriculum project.

Thus, this book has reinforced these opinions in me.

Non-cyclical movement of development of the overmind

What I liked about this book is the stance that the overmind is not running in circles, but it’s rather developing. The overlords said that there were 5 other races before humans. And that the overmind was trying to trigger the cocooning process on its own before, which always resulted in bad consequences.

In this vein, it’s interesting to see an overmind which is actively developing and growing. It’s not static, like our conventional Gods who don’t need anything and who just ARE.

I think that this might be pretty close to reality, and there might exist some other beings that probably dwell in higher dimensions and who impact our actions in this dimension. And those beings also gotta have their plans and goals. They also gotta be working on them, as opposed to endlessly running in circles without any clear goals in mind.

Value of writing such reviews for me

I know this review is pretty around the place and I am writing a lot of not-so-related material in here, as opposed to enumerating the events that occurred in the book. Honestly, this is my first try in this type of writing, and I haven’t read any other reviews of this type before. But I am sure that writing reviews like this on a regular basis will help me improve my writing skills as well as overall cognitive skills as well.

Plans to keep on writing reviews for the next 10 years because of the expected value described above

I plan to keep on writing reviews like this for the next 10 years to come because I am currently writing a blog about digital marketing and such exercises are expected to deliver huge value in terms of developing my writing skills. The more I write materials like this, the better I will get.

And it makes sense to do something that improves the relevant skills again and again over a lengthy period of time, like, 10 years, because this is how you uncover the high-potential points of growth.