Throughout the 1950s, these two superpowers and their respective allies engaged in fierce competition both on the world’s surface (the Korean War, 1950-53) and above it (the launching by the Soviets of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, followed by the United States’s own Explorer 1 four months later). Already the British statesman could see the world dividing into two separate spheres, with Communist Russia leading the East and the United States leading the West. But as early as the Yalta Conference in 1945, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew that this would not be the case. In the closing days of World War II, many longed for a return to the peaceful stature of prewar society. Despite an exterior of unprecedented material bliss, beneath the surface lay the fear of impending doom at the hands of the Soviet Union.

Eisenhower summarized the prevailing mood of the fifties. With this one brief phrase, United States President Dwight D. “We have arrived at the point … where there is just no real alternative to peace” (Constable, p. Events in History at the Time of the Novel Life in the fifties The influence of the interplanetary society is apparent in Childhood’s End, the novel most responsible for placing Clarke’s name among the foremost science fiction authors. For the next two decades, his interest in this group would endure, through his tenure as a radar instructor in the Royal Air Force during World War II and later as a student in physics and pure and applied mathematics at King’s College in London. Four years later, he joined the British Interplanetary Society, a group founded on the common desire for space exploration. At the age of twelve, he read his first science fiction magazine, a November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories.

Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in Minehead, England, a small coastal town on the Bristol Channel. Only later is it discovered that they are preparing Earth’s children to transcend into a superhuman entity known as the Overrnind.Įvents in History at the Time of the NovelĪrthur C.

Members of an alien race known as the Overlords mysteriously appear over Earth’s major cities and promise to eliminate war, hunger, and poverty. A science fiction novel set primarily on Earth from the mid-1970s to nearly a century into the future published in 1953.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke