Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood’s End. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
Childhood’s End: Introduction
Childhood’s End: Plot Summary
Childhood’s End: Detailed Summary & Analysis
Childhood’s End: Themes
Childhood’s End: Quotes
Childhood’s End: Characters
Childhood’s End: Symbols
Childhood’s End: Theme Wheel
Brief Biography of Arthur C. Clarke
Historical Context of Childhood’s End
Other Books Related to Childhood’s End
- Full Title: Childhood’s End
- When Written: 1952
- Where Written: England
- When Published: 1953
- Literary Period: Contemporary
- Genre: science fiction
- Setting: Earth and various places in space
- Climax: the children join the Overmind and destroy the Earth
- Antagonist: the Overmind
- Point of View: third-person
Extra Credit for Childhood’s End
Sooner Than He Thought. The first chapter of Childhood’s End initially described the space race between the US and the Soviet Union taking place in the early 21st century. At the time of writing, Clarke could never have conceived that man would first enter space in less than a decade. Realizing that he had misjudged humanity’s foray into space by half a century, he rewrote the first chapter.
Growing Skeptic. At the time of writing (1953), Clarke was a firm believer in the existence of paranormal events and abilities. By 1989, having spent decades and millions of dollars trying to prove their existence through his TV shows and other ventures, he declared that he was nearly a “total sceptic,” though still believed that something somewhere must exist outside the bounds of scientific rationalism.