Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Childhood’s End, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Mysticism
Benevolent Dictatorship and Freedom
Utopia and Creative Apathy
Individuality, Globalization, and Progress
The Fate of Humanity
Summary
Analysis
Karellen has organized a press conference and all of the journalists and reporters are in attendance, waiting. Karellen emerges, stepping up onto a dais to make his announcement, speaking briefly with the doyen of the Press Club. Karellen announces to the reporters that the Overlords have just discovered that a stowaway named Jan Rodricks made it onto an Overlord supply ship, stunning the room. It is not something that will be possible again. When a reporter asks what will happen to Jan, Karellen replies that it is not his decision, but he assumes Jan will be sent back on the next ship, since their planet is much too alien for him.
Karellen’s pronouncement that the Overlords’ planet is far too alien for Jan stay on foreshadows what Jan will discover himself later in the story: humanity is not ready for space. Though Jan will see many things on the Overlord planet, he will understand very few of them and discover that Karellen is right: there is no place for him there. This is a marked tonal shift from Clarke’s other work and the majority of that era’s science fiction, which pictured the universe as humanity’s future conquest.
Themes
Karellen states that the main purpose of his announcement today is to explain why humans are banned from space. A man entering the incomprehensible complexity of space at their current mental acuity, he says, would be similar to a cave man being dropped in a modern city. He goes on to say that the inability of humanity to understand what they would see in space could even be potentially lethal. Karellen shows the people in the room a holographic map of space to explain that, at their current evolutionary stage, humanity is simply not ready to face the vastness of the universe. His statement over, Karellen begins to leave, turning briefly to say, “It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.”
Karellen speaks to the natural limits of human progress and achievement. This is a unique angle for the author to take, especially in the optimism and excitement of the 1950s when the novel was written. The space race was in full swing, and though Clarke underestimated how long it would take humanity to reach space, many assumed that once that was achieved, it would be a simple few extra steps to reach the moon, then Mars, and soon be colonizing other planets. In the face of a seemingly limitless future, Clarke poses the question: what if humanity simply isn’t capable of handling any domain beyond Earth?
Themes
From his ship in the stratosphere, Karellen looks down at the Earth and thinks of the people on it, reflecting on the Golden Age they have had the opportunity to experience, more happiness than has ever been achieved before. He feels a sense of responsibility for them, and sadness, for he knows that the Golden Age is about to end.
Clarke poses another possibility: perhaps it is all going to end, not by war or nuclear winter but by the workings of the universe and circumstances utterly beyond human control. Reflecting these questions, from this point on, the novel takes a decidedly pessimistic turn.
Themes
