Childhood\'s End Clarke\'s Childhood\'s End

Childhood's End

Clarke's Childhood's End

Advances in technology, no matter how salutary for the human race, often have a terrible, unintended consequence of sundering or alienating parents from their children. The nature of the new technical world creates a new culture for the emerging generation that the parents do not feel a part of, or cannot fully understand. At the beginning of the Arthur C. Clarke utopian science fiction novel entitled Childhood's End, already, in the world of the future "the cities that had been good enough for earlier generations had been rebuilt." (71) in other words, a utopian environment has been created for the present generation that is wholly different from the expectations of the past generation of what it means to live a good, quality life for a human being.

One of the conditions of this new life is a kind of ignorance, for the Overlord founders of the new, hitherto-undreamt of perfect world have a technology so superior to the dwellers that they cannot understand it. However, the Overlords attempt to remedy this situation by educating the next generation in the advancing technology. This education will create an inevitable break between the values and the knowledge base, however, of the present generation of parents such as Jane and George, and their offspring. The Overlords regard this as merely unfortunate, but for the parents of the novel's present who are still tied with human feelings towards their offspring, the consequences of this evolutionary jump are emotionally harrowing.

This disconnection between parents and children in the novel, one could argue, parallels today's environment where the parents of today frequently cannot understand the how's and why's behind the technology their children are dependant upon, such as the Internet and cell phones. One could even argue that today's children have expectations of luxuries and bright futures far in excess of their parent's past expectations, dreams, and visions of a future good life.

Thus, if George and Jean have come to lead a life far in excess of their own parent's expectations, Jeffrey and Jenny are expected by the Overlord rulers to further this process of alienation as they experience an even more seismic evolutionary step forward in the nature of their understanding and 'being' in the world. While the children of the present generation become more profoundly advanced, in ways undreamed of by their parents, the children inevitably lose a sense of personal connection with the human beings who gave them birth. The Overlords or powers of the state and fate have become the children's parents, not their biological parents.

Clarke reflects that on one hand this is somewhat positive in its implications. One could argue that a lessening of familial and national ties facilitates the more peaceful future existence envisioned over the course of the novel. But this also means that the parents Jane and George lose their children in some sense. The children do not love their parents in the same way that their parents love them, because the children have become part of a more generalized and advanced universe. "Jeffrey might have been any boy in the world. We call it Total Breakthrough. There is no need for any secrecy," states one of the Overlords. (168)