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this destruction as merely a side effect of an otherwise benign evolutionary process, but actually remains typically ambivalent about it. And here (. . .) ambivalence screens a single-minded wish for destruction. Although the narrative persistently points out that the aliens have saved the human race from itself, it also laments that in doing so they have also prevented us from reaching our potential. The novel figures this potential tellingly in terms of the space race, which both Clarke and history remind us was a competition to make total nuclear war technologically feasible. In both its approval of the alien intervention, and in its regret for the lost possibilities of human history, the novel expresses the same wishto bring about the end of the world.
But although this ambivalence may be disingenuous, it does point to one of the most important features of apocalyptic fantasy. The dedication page of the book carries an odd warning that the author is "not responsible" for the opinions expressed within. This seems at first only a part of the novel's pervasive structure of mystification, which offers its narrative not as fiction but as a channel for some supernatural Truth, but this denial of responsibility is itself not the whole story. The narrative finds the aliens' version of the end of the world unsatisfactory because it takes that end out of human hands: it is important not merely that the end has come, but that we bring it about. Clarke's novel suggests this in its climactic scenes, which go to great lengths to provide one adult witness to Earth's destruction. As the world vanishes, this witness reports: "oh, this is hard to describe, but just then I felt a great wave of emotion sweep over me. It wasn't joy or sorrow; it was a sense of fulfillment, achievement." (. . .) In its claim to offer something more than fiction, and in the desire that overwhelms the narrator of that revelation, Childhood's End reminds us that apocalyptic prophecy is always more than simple showingas a narrative mode, prophecy seeks urgently not only to report but to fulfill its account. By adopting this prophetic stance, and by insisting on an individual narrator as the channel of its prophecy, the narrative seeks to gain control over these events, to be not merely their passive victim but their agent.
Terence Holt, "The Bomb and the Baby Boom," TriQuarterly No. 80 (Winter 1990 91): 21213
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Neil McAleer
Clarke confesses he wants to believe that there is life elsewhere in the universe, "because it's very lonely if there's nobody

 
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