I don't get it.

[rivka]

I decided - and we'll see how long this lasts - to read this year's Hugo and Retro-Hugo nominees for Best Novel. The Retro-Hugo, for those of you not following along at home, applies to novels first published in 1953. I've never had much interest in Golden Age SF - I bounced pretty hard off several books that are supposed to be classics, and eventually I gave up. But I'm eligible to vote for the Hugoes this year, and so I figured what the hell, I'll give the Golden Age another try.

So I read Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and I don't get it.

I mean, I followed the plot, and all, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Setting aside the woo-woo parapsychology stuff, about which I'm willing to suspend my disbelief:

Why the strange passivity of humanity, from the moment the ships appear? I get that creativity is supposed to cease because of the end of conflict, but I don't buy that human conflict and suffering have ended just because humanity no longer makes war or suffers material want. And why would all of humanity suddenly agree that efforts to make scientific progress are pointless, merely because of the arrival of a species that knows much more than we do and refuses to share their knowledge? Why would religious impulses vanish in an instant, simply because of an ability to see into the past - are all world religions (except for a stripped-down version of Buddhism, apparently) supposed to be based solely on an interpretation of historical fact? Why aren't the stars for man? Just because we can't comprehend all of them, all cultures and worlds, at once, why should that prevent us from slow exposure to nearby worlds?

I see with a Google Groups search that someone has provided a passable gloss of the novel as a Christian allegory, and although I'm pretty sure it doesn't meet the strict literary definition of "allegory," I can sort of see how the book works on that level. Okay, I guess, but still...

I know that there are people out there who love this book, who see it as a Great SF Classic Of The Ages. Explain it to me, please. Help me see what you see. Am I just too young for this book? Am I missing the point completely? Or what?

Comments

[ororo.livejournal.com]

I think I was twelve or thirteen when I read it and loved it. Reading your comment makes me want to read it again, but I didn't see it at the library today.