Utopia in Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
“No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”
—Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
The book Childhood’s End resulted from a voluminous expansion of the novella “Guardian Angel” which originally appeared in two versions: a somewhat shorter, American one which appeared in the April 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and was edited by James Blish who condensed it and made minor alterations, and Clarke’s original version—which was published in the Winter 1950 issue of the British journal New Worlds. This latter one was subsequently used as the basis for the first of three parts of the future book.
The book being discussed here takes a special place in Clarke’s SF writings, among other things because it presents the most complete axiology of the author’s view of the world through a highly indicative sample of scientific Utopia. One of the advantages of treating this motif in “Childhood’s End” is witnessed in the fact that it does not hold a key position in the structure of the plot but rather it occurs in a broader reference where conditions are amenable for studying it from external and internal perspectives.
In placing the scientific Utopia in the coordinate of a cosmic history of the human race and not in an earthly one, Clarke found himself obliged to re-examine the plausibility of the function on which it is founded as well as the worthiness of the goals which it supports. Indeed, this re-examination did not essentially belittle science as a key factor on a specific level of the development of civilization, but it did point to certain general inadequacies in the Utopia which is founded on it-with regard to a much more relevant and general system of values than the ephemeral ideals of “the childhood” of mankind.
The scientific Utopia depicted in this work of the British author has a significant feature. It does not represent the fruits of human zeal, but rather comes as the result of external intervention by non-Earthly beings, whose degree of scientific advancement is incomparably higher than Man’s. The motives of these “altruistic” deeds of the Overlords are not directly pertinent to our deliberation; furthermore, the human actors in the novel Childhood’s End did not manage to grasp everything by the end of the novel, when it became clear that in the plans of the newcomers from cosmos Utopia was only a temporary and secondary phase whose background was devoid of only altruistic motives in the stricter sense of the word.
Clarke cites three conditions which enabled the Overlords to fundamentally change Man’s world in a mere fifty years: “a clearly-determined goal,” “a knowledge of social engineering” and “power.” From the description of a subsequent realization of “the new world,” however, it becomes clear that the first two conditions actually represent only prerequisites for the creation of a Utopia, while the focal point is exclusively found in “power”. Clarke understands this term to mean the appropriate volume of scientific knowledge required to set up a positive form of control over the planet on which Man resides.
Just as in all Utopias, this control of Man’s world is aimed at creating conditions under which every individual would be free of the obligations which hinder his creative activity. In “Childhood’s End”, these conditions are treated in somewhat greater detail on two occasions, in chapters six and ten.
The emancipation of the individual-creator takes place on several levels, beginning with direct labour production all the way to professions in the world of entertainment, such as certain fields of sport. The Overlords first of all enabled the complete automatic production of basic consumption commodities, which completely eradicated the struggle for bare subsistence characteristic for all earlier periods. “The average working week was now twenty hours-but those twenty hours were no sinecure. There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photoelectric cells, and a cubic metre of printed circuits could perform.”
