Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham were my favourite sci-fi authors as a boy, as an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old at the start of the 1970s. Clarke was still happily writing, I remember excitedly swapping Rendezvous with Rama with friends soon after it came out.

Childhood’s End is his fifth novel and one of the best books I had ever read. The memory of the book’s artful pacing, and the cumulative revelations leading up to the nihilistic final scenes, made an impact on my young imagination which has lasted all my life.

Premise

The idea behind the plot can be relatively simply stated.

There are lots of inhabited planets in the universe. Most of the inhabitants proceed through a similar cycle, from agriculture to industrialisation and scientific literacy, then the start of space travel and so on. It’s at this point that they are ready to move on to ‘the next stage’. A race called the Overlords is dispatched to guide them. Under the tutelage of the Overlords – who abolish war and poverty – the pupil race becomes wise and peaceful, experiencing a Golden Age.

But this is all deceiving. The Overlords have not been sent to supervise this golden age and are not there for the good of the pupil race at all. Another power, a power deeper and older and more powerful than them, the ‘Overmind’, has detected that the supervised species is about to move on to the next stage of evolution, to abandon physical bodies and become pure minds, initially as individuals, then uniting together to form a group mind, and then abandoning the host planet altogether to take to the stars and join the Overmind.

This is the basic plot of Childhood’s End. It is an epic story about the near future transformation of the human race into a completely new species and the end of the world as we know it, so big, so awe-inspiring, it reminds you of the galactic prophecies of H.G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon.

What makes it so powerful is that Clarke turns this story into a thriller. We don’t see this narrative told as a whole through the eyes of some future historian. Instead we discover it piecemeal through the eyes of a succession of pretty normal human characters, each of whom experiences a particular phase of the development, each of whom is granted a waystation revelation, learns a part of the truth, each of which is as much of a shock and surprise to them as it is to the reader, as the narrative as a whole slowly peels off skins like an onion, giving the reader a succession of imaginative jolts and marvels, a sense of mounting horror and suspense, right up until the shocking end-of-the-world scenes of the last few pages.

Key episodes

1 Earth and the Overlords

Thus the book opens by describing the work of two German rocket scientists, one captured by the Soviets, one by the Americans at the end of the Second World War. They are both nearing completion of plans for man-carrying rockets for their respective Cold War masters, when one day they look up and see the vast silver ships of the Overlords in the sky above them. At a stroke the world’s population realises that ‘we are not alone’. At a stroke, the rocket scientists realise their work is futile.

Five years later a lengthy section lets us get to know Rikki Stormgren, the Finnish Secretary General of the United Nations. We learn that within days of their arrival the Overlords (an earth nickname, not the name they give themselves) gave one speech across the whole world’s radio sets explaining that they are here to help not harm, to prevent the nuclear wars which might lead to humanity’s extinction – and then had settled down into a routine of inviting Stormgren to a weekly conference to discuss the management of earth.

To attend, Stormgren enters a metal pod via a set of retractable steps, then the pod zooms up into the stratosphere, entering a brief opening in the spaceship which immediately closes. When the pod door opens he finds himself in a comfortable room with a grille and a big screen which is blank and opaque. He hears the voice of the being named Karellan, who speaks perfect English, is always calm and polite, knows all about earth politics, and always gives wise advice about international problems. Despite questioning from Stormgren, Karellan gives little or nothing away about the Overlords.

The Overlords only interfere in earth affairs twice: in South Africa apartheid has collapsed and been replaced with persecution of the white minority which the Overlords intervene to put an end to. And – in a scene I have remembered my whole life – in Spain, at a bullfight, when the first toreador sticks a spear into the bull, the entire audience of 10,000 experiences what the bull feels and shrieks in agony (p.37). The Overlords abolish cruelty to animals.

Unsurprisingly, a movement has grown up resenting the Overlords’ intrusion in human affairs, the ‘Freedom League’ led by a man named Alexander Wainwright. One night Stormgren is kidnapped and – in scenes more reminiscent of a thriller – smuggled out of his house, swapped from a car to a lorry in a deep tunnel (to escape the Overlords’ detection devices), driven south then flown to South America where he wakes up in the hands of some goons from the Freedom League. They are fairly civilised, just want to know more about Stormgren’s weekly meetings with Karellan. As you might expect he is soon rescued by the all-powerful Overlords. In a compelling scene, the interrogators suddenly freeze in mid-sentence and Stormgren hears a polite voice emanating from a small metal sphere hovering at head height, which guides him out of the old mine works where he’s being held hostage, into one of the Overlords’ little flying machines, and so back to freedom (p.38).

Fifteen pages are then devoted to another episode featuring Stormgren as he discusses with his number two, Pieter van Ryberg, and the senior scientist at the UN, a Frenchman named Duval, a plan to see beyond the opaque screen in the ‘meeting room’. It takes Duval a few weeks to work up a super-powerful torch which Stormgren can hide in the base of the briefcase he always takes with him to the meetings. When the time seems right he can swing it up to face the screen and see if the torch’s beam illuminates what they all guess must be the room on the other side – and the Overlord who occupies it.

At this next meeting, Stormgren repeats the complaints of much of the population that they want to know what their rulers and masters look like. Karellan promises to make a global announcement that the Overlords will reveal themselves in fifty years time. Only then, he argues, will humanity have become completely acculturated and used to their presence, and their appearance won’t have the same impact.

As the conversation comes to an end Stormgren leaps up and swings the flashlight towards the opaque screen. He is just in time to see a room like the one he’s sitting in and a huge figure exiting an enormous door. What he sees shocks and stuns him for the rest of his life. We, the readers, have to wait till the next section to find out why.

2 The Golden Age (pp.56-119)

The fifty years are up. An Overlord flyer touches down on earth. The world’s press is gathered expectantly for the first Overlord to show himself. A doorway opens and gangway descends. Two little earth children from the crowd are invited up it. And then an enormous figures steps down the gangway, holding the sweet children in his arms. It is the figure of an enormous devil, deep red in colour, complete with horns and cloven hooves, leathery wings and long pointed tail! The social impact is immense. Now we learn what Stormgren had glimpsed in the spaceship fifty years earlier. And the meaning of his speculation that the two races must have met, sometime back in the mists of time, and something gone very badly wrong between them to leave such a diabolical folk memory.

But fifty years was the right period. Most people alive now accept the Overlords’ rule completely. Also, organised religion has faded away under the Rule of reason instituted by the Overlords and so there isn’t a great population of fundamentalists to stir up trouble (pp.56-58).

Clarke then embarks on a long description of the Golden Age of peace and plenty which the human race experiences. Ignorance, disease, poverty and fear cease to exist. Everyone speaks English. New agriculture supplies all food needs. Robots man the factories which supply a world of new consumer goods. The end of the Cold War, and all war, frees up resources and skills to be devoted to entirely peaceful ends. New technology creates flying machines which can get to anywhere on earth in under a day. Most people have at least two houses, often in exotic locations such as the top of Mount Kilimanjaro or deep in the Pacific depths.

With so much time on their hands humanity, as so often in these kinds of utopian visions, turn out to be immensely bookish, takes to higher education till age 25, becomes philosophers and poets and artists. Nobody has to do any work they don’t want to.

Like a good liberal Clarke imagines that all religious faiths will wither away. The Overlords give historical institutes a kind of historical TV machine which can show scenes from the past. Human historians immediately go back to check out the real people behind the legends of Moses, Mohammed, Jesus and so on. Organised religion does not survive the immense disillusionment of what they find (p.63). So religion disappears and the human race turns into millions of bookish, thoughtful, jolly nice chaps rather like, well, Arthur C. Clarke.

All this is exemplified in the social set around Rupert Boyce and his mixed-race wife, Maia, who give a stylish party at Rupert’s mountain-top home. Guests include a famous film producer, a minor poet, a mathematician, two famous actors, an atomic power engineer, a game warden, the editor of a weekly news magazine, a statistician from the World Bank, a violin virtuoso, a professor of archaeology and an astrophysicist. The world has turned into Hampstead.

Among the guests are George Greggson and Jean Morrel who are going to turn out to be tremendously important to the story, and the future of the human race.

They are astonished to discover that one of the guests is an Overlord, Rashaverak, who is quietly reading through Rupert’s world-famous and priceless collection of antique and ancient books about astrology, parapsychology, clairvoyance and so on.

Half way through the party, a bit drunk, George finds himself on the roof with another guest, a black man named Jan Rodricks, who is half-brother to the host’s wife, Maia. Jan is an astrophysicist, quiet and self-contained so George soon returns to the noisy party below,but Jan also will be a key player in the last stages of the novel.

George is talked by Rupert into attending a drunken session of Ouija the host has organised. It uses an up-to-date design by consisting of a round table of ballbearings on which is placed a circular tray. All the members – Rupert, Maia, George, Jean and, latterly, Jan – place hands on the tray while Rupert asks questions. Then the tray moves around the table towards the words Yes or No printed on the edge, along with all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1 to 10.

They seem to get half sensible answers to some of Rupert’s questions but drunk George thinks it’s all nonsense until Jan, out of nowhere, asks the identity of the Overlords’ home star. To his surprise the board immediately spells out the number NGS 549672 and most people are too puzzled by this to notice George’s partner, Jean, faint.

Jan recognizes this as a star-catalog number and travels to the Royal Astronomical Society in London where he looks it up and confirms it is a star which really exists and has been logged. Earlier we had observed him watching from Rupert’s roof one of the Overlords’ supply ships taking off from the moon and leaving a long tracer line across the sky: along with their appearance the Overlords no longer conceal that a) there is not in fact a fleet of ships but only one, the one hovering over New York, all the others were holograms and b) that they receive supplies from their home planet via a transhipping base on Pluto.

We cut to a discussion between Rashaverak – who witnessed the Ouija board scene – and Karellan. The latter says ‘it has begun’ creating a tremendous sense of suspense and anticipation in the reader, and they both indicate that Jean must, somehow, have been the channel through which this inaccessible knowledge had reached the Ouija board.

Jan then goes to visit Professor Sullivan in his research lab miles and miles underwater in the South Pacific Basin. For some time the Overlords have been collecting examples of earth’s flora and fauna. Jan has discovered that Professor Sullivan has been asked to supply examples of the world’s two largest creatures, the giant squid and the blue whale, for them. In fact they are going to build and design them from scratch with metal skeletons, cover them with rubber and plastic and paint them. Real samples would be difficult to get hold of and would stink and rot.

Jan proposes a scheme: that they build a hidey-hole into the metal whale and Jan stows away and flies to the Overlords’ home planet. Sullivan enthusiastically agrees to help. This storyline takes up twenty pages and brings us to the end of part two. Jan successfully stows away, the artificial whale is lifted up to the Overlord spaceship and it departs for its home planet.

Before departing Jan thoughtfully writes his sister Maia a letter laying out some of the practical issues: since the Overlord ships travel at near light speed, and Jan has identified that star NGS 549672 is 40 light years from earth, he will be gone for 40 years there and, assuming they send him right back, 40 years coming back. However, due to the weirdness of relativity, because he’s flying at near light speed, Jan himself will only age a few months. (Clarke gives an additional explanation that the line of light which Jan saw behind the departing spaceship wasn’t caused by anything so banal as flames from rockets, but due to the bending of light or maybe of the fabric of space-time itself, by the near light speed passage of the ship: he is not seeing a line of fire but a line of the bending of space into which the light of multiple stars is strained in order to create the impression of a line of light.) Jan is taking a supply of food, oxygen and will inject a narcoleptic to create a state of drug-induced hibernation for the duration of the flight.

This second section ends with Karellan holding a press conference at which he announces to the world’s press that the Overlords have discovered the presence of a stowaway, Jan, on one of their ships: he will be sent right back. But the incident has raised the whole issue of humans and space travel. The Overlords have allowed humans to develop the technology to fly to the moon and set up bases there. But now Karellan demonstrates why humans will never go to the stars. He conjures up a three dimensional hologram of the whole galaxy and then the universe. He points out that when the Overlords arrived mankind was on the bring of sparking a nuclear war. They saved them from that fate but if they can’t even manage the affairs of one little planet how, he rhetorically asks, would they cope with this: and the gorgeous fabric of millions upon millions of stars in the Milky Way strikes the attending press and scientists dumb.

3 The Last Generation (pp.120-189)

This final third of the novel is extraordinarily powerful and has two main threads. In the first we follow Jan Rodericks as he arrives at the Overlords’s home planet and what he finds and sees there. In the second, we follow Jean and George Greggson, who we met at Rupert’s party and now the significance of that seance session finally becomes clear.

We had already met the kind of people Clarke thinks will flourish in the future – film directors, poets, philosophers and the like. Now a group of these bien-pensant liberals establishes an artists’ colony on an island in the Pacific, which they immodestly name New Athens.

Among them are George and Jean Greggson, who by now have a seven year old son, Jeffrey, and a baby daughter Jennifer Anne. One day Jeffrey is playing on the beach when he feels a distant rumble and then the tide goes out out out and continues going out. Having seen footage and movies of this phenomenon I know this indicates a tsunami is coming but Jeffrey, inevitably, wanders down the beach following the tide until… a voice speaks in his ear telling him to Run run, and he turns and sets off up the beach and then up apath into the surrounding cliff as fast as his feet can carry him. It is a sweet bit of thriller detail when he finds a big rock blocking his way, the voice tells him to close his eyes, there’s a loud fizzing sound and when he opens his eyes the rock has gone so he can continue running.

All this is made that much more dramatic and involving by being told by Jeffrey in his own boyish words to his parents, who initially think he is making it up… until George himself visits the path and finds a rock which has clearly been blasted to nothingness. Only the Overlords could have done this. But why?

Then odd things start happening with Jennifer the baby. Her mother has a fit when she hears the rattle rattling but goes into the baby’s room to find it being shaken a metre above the baby’s head, unheld by any human hand. Jennifer begins to exercise other telekinetic powers. Soon food finds its way from the fridge to her cot by itself. She feeds and looks after herself, while her mother retreats into shock and George desperately tries to figure out what’s going on.

Eventually Kerallan tells them, explaining the basic premise of the narrative which I described above: the Overlords serve the Overmind, a vast cosmic intelligence, born of amalgamated ancient civilizations and freed from the limitations of material existence. The Overlords themselves are unable to join the Overmind, but serve it as a bridge species, fostering other races’ eventual union with it.

Now, Karellen explains, the time of humanity as a race of single individuals each with a concrete identity is coming to an end. The Overlords have been present at four such metamorphoses and know that it always starts with one member of the species ‘breaking through’. Then like the first crystal in a solution that one example catalyses all the others. Which explains why George and Jean become aware that other people’s children on New Athens are developing the same skills. Jeffrey had gone a long way down the road to individuality, but now he is called back into the group mind, also becoming indifferent to his parents’ existence.

All the children on new Athens become infected. Their minds reach into each other and merge into a single vast group consciousness. If the Pacific were to be dried up, Karellan explains, the islands speckling it would lose their identity as islands and become part of one new continent. Their children are now ceasing to be the individuals which their parents knew and are becoming something else, completely alien to the ‘old type of human’.

Adult society takes the decision to move all the transforming children to one continent, for their own safety and because their parents can’t bear their proximity, and cannot do anything for them now. Cameras are placed around their settlements to observe their strange behaviour. Sometimes they wander with their eyes closed. Sometimes they join hands and dance. They become filthy and ragged, their bodies mattering less and less.

The members of New Athens – that ideal colony of Hampstead intellectuals – are plunged into such grief and despair they blow themselves up with an atomic bomb planted at the base of the island. All over the planet the adult humans have to come to grips with the realisation that – their culture, their race, their species is ceasing to exist. Many choose not to live on.

Meanwhile, 40 light years away, Jan Rodricks emerges from hibernation on the Overlord supply ship and arrives on their planet. Clarke is really good at depicting a place which has physical reality but almost every aspect of which is genuinely alien and incomprehensible to him, not least the vast volcano-shaped mountain in the far distance which emits vast rings of smoke which then fly over the Overlord city. None of the Overlords were expecting him so no-one speaks English, until one slowly learns the language enough to give him a broken insight into their ways and purposes.

But then he is politely told that he will be placed on the next freight ship heading to earth and off he goes. Months later, as the Overlord shuttle enters earth orbit, Jan realises there’s something wrong. It takes him a moment and then he realises that there are no lights on the dark side of the earth, facing away from the sun. Almost as if those hundreds of brightly illuminated cities have… gone.

And of course this is what he discovers when the Overlord pod deposits him back on the surface. Karellan meets him and explains everything that has happened. The entire adult human race has either died out or killed itself. Jan is now the last man alive.

Only hundreds of millions of children – no longer fitting Jan’s definition of ‘human’ – remain on the quarantined continent, having become a single intelligence readying themselves to join the Overmind.

Jan finds that some Overlords have remained on Earth to study the children from a safe distance. When the evolved children mentally alter the Moon’s rotation and make other planetary manipulations, it becomes too dangerous to remain. The departing Overlords offer to take Rodricks with them, but he chooses to stay to witness Earth’s end and transmit a report of what he sees.

Before they depart, Rodricks asks Rashaverak what encounter the Overlords had with humanity in the past, according to an assumption that the fear that humans had of their ‘demonic’ form was due to a traumatic encounter with them in the distant past. But, in a really imaginative touch, Rashaverak explains that the primal fear experienced by humans was not due to a racial memory, but a racial premonition of the Overlords’ role in their metamorphosis. Time, as the Overlords have repeatedly told their human proteges, is much stranger than we can imagine. It was fear and anger and hatred of this future which endowed the figure of the devil with such terror.

Right up to the end the Overlords want to study what happens. They candidly explain to Jan that they are sad at their barrenness. Why do other species transform into mind and join the Overmind? Why can’t they? Hence their intense interest at studying, for example, all the books in Rupert Boyce’s library, hence their remaining on to study the children long after the rest of the human race has gone extinct.

Now Jan remains behind to witness the end of planet earth and relay his impressions and thoughts via radio to the Overlords whose spaceship retires to a safe distance, namely ‘six thousand million kilometres beyond the orbit of Pluto’ (p.189).

Jan describes earthquakes and spots of fire in the sky, and then how different fires come together to form a vast burning column which ascends from the planet into space. As the column disappears he experiences a terrible sense of emptiness when the children have gone. The atmosphere is leaving the planet taking with it everything which isn’t secured. Then everything around him and the earth itself become transparent and he can see a great white light emanating from the core of the planet upwards towards him.

The Earth evaporates in a flash of light. The children have used every atom of it as fuel to drive their final metamorphosis and journey to join the Overmind. Karellen looks back at the receding Solar System, reflects on the fate of the Overlords to obey, and the incomprehensible fate of the human race.

Critique

The everyday

It is a fantastic book, convincing and thrilling. Some critics think the human settings of each episode – the minutiae of Rikki Stormgren’s living arrangements and his kidnapping, or the immense labour spent describing the ins and outs of George and Jean Greggson’s marriage detract from the story, but I agree with Clarke’s approach and it’s what I like about Wyndham’s novels, as well. That these awe-inspiring changes happen to perfectly ordinary – or in fictional terms, ordinary – people. For me the fantasy is far more effective for being rooted in the everyday.

Anglocentric

When I read the long central section, the Golden Age, I thought, Wow! This is what the future’s going to be like! Clarke predicts that:

• Everyone will speak English
• Technology will do all the dirty jobs, giving everyone masses of leisure time
• Everyone will have advanced university educations, often to age 25
• organised religion will have withered away
• quick cheap travel will be available for all

You can see how these assumptions grow out of faith that the post-war American economic boom would prove endless, and spread around the world, providing a never-ending stream of gee whizz technology.

When Clark wrote the Yanks were perfecting and marketing a dazzling array of household white goods – fridges, freezers, fridge freezers, ice machines, toaster, barbecues, hoovers, washing machines, tumble dryers. Futurologists, politicians and advertising companies thought it would never stop.

In economic, technical, scientific and cultural terms America emerged as the leader of the world. Hence the Overlords’ space ship hovers – as so many alien spaceships before and since have done – over New York, the only city which really counts in these kinds of stories.

But the 65 years since the book was published have proved otherwise. There are other countries in the world besides America. Not everyone wants to be American or to speak English. A whole load of angry Muslims can testify to that, not to mention Indians, Indonesians, the whole of South America, and so on.

The poor have not been eradicated. There is not enough food for everyone. There is not so little work to be done that everyone devotes their lives to leisure, poetry and philosophy. It’s striking how sci fi prophets from Wells to Clarke have all made exactly the same set of mistaken predictions based on:

1. complete ignorance of economics
2. complete ignorance of human nature

Economics Capitalism works through companies achieving competitive advantage. No company is going to introduce a new labour-saving technology which gives them a competitive advantage – and then let the whole workforce have half the week off. More likely they’ll introduce the technology and make everyone work harder, attending training courses and keeping up with the machines’ new higher levels of demand.

All through my teens in the 1970s Tomorrow’s World and every other magazine and new programme, all the articles by Asimov and Clarke and blizzards of other futurologists told us that technology was just about to usher in a new world of leisure. The great struggle of life by the early 21st century would be deciding how to spend all this leisure time, which course to take at the free universities, whether to become a poet or a painter.

Human nature Educated white men, bookish writers like Asimov and Clarke, imagined that in the future everyone would become educated and bookish like, well like them. That the future would be full of swots who, freed from the need to do work, would dabble in philosophy or art.

Has it turned out that way? Or was that just a laughably self-centred and blinkered view of human nature.

From Dickens through Wells and Huxley and then the great waves of 1950s sci fi gurus, right through to the present day, liberals all pin their hopes on education to bring about social reform. For me, this is a doomed approach. Maybe because I grew up among a lot of working class people who didn’t just not want an education, and were itching to leave school at 16 so they could get a job, money, a car and a girlfriend – but who also actively despised, bullied, threw stones and spat at anyone they caught reading.

Most people are not bookish. Plenty of people never read a book from one Christmas to the next. Those who do read, tend to read very intensively and make the cardinal error of thinking that everyone else is like them. Like all liberals, Clarke assumes that people want to be educated, want to be jolly bookish chaps like himself.

But they don’t, they really don’t.

Religion A massive tell-tale symptom of this secular liberalism is Clarke’s confidence that all religions will fade away, wither and die, disappear.

The numbers of people who admit to religious belief in the post-industrial west may well continue to decline, but in the rest of the world? In the Muslim world? In Latin America? In south-east Asia? In Africa? In nationalist India? All around the world passionate and sometimes violent religious belief continues to flourish.

It seems to me that sci-fi fantasies like this are messages from a specific place and time and culture which made the great mistake of assuming its very narrow and specific values would spread out to conquer all humanity.

Asimov, Clarke, Blish, they write stories in which techy white male Americans end up running everything, everyone speaks English, everyone uses American tech, everyone adopts American values, everyone is behind America’s efforts to colonise space.

As that period of American triumphalism (roughly 1950 to 1975) recedes, these works become more dated, period pieces, insights into a worldview which is becoming as remote as the medieval Europe which thought that the great Day of Judgement was just around the corner.

Maybe you could almost make the generalisation that science fiction, as a genre, expects just such a great change is just around the corner, comparable to all those feverish end-of-the-world predictions which seized men’s minds from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.

In science fictions from Wells to Wyndham a great event is just about to take place which will change everything.

Maybe, not so deep down, science fiction as a genre feeds on that profound human wish that there should be an apocalyptic change or ending or transformation, now, within our lifetimes, something, anything, to relieve the boredom, oppression, grinding, numbing grind of the daily struggle for existence.

It’s true there have been real changes and great turning points over the past century – the beginning and end of the two world wars, the atom bombs on Japan, the Soviet detonation of a hydrogen bomb, Sputnik, men on the moon, the collapse of the communist bloc in 1990 – these have been big cultural, social, scientific and political changes.

But deep down they didn’t change anything. People everywhere have still had to scrape a living, worried about their children, got ill and died in the same old way. Only above a certain level of education and literacy, and from a particularly Western perspective, do better-educated professional people care much about these kind of historic events.

For most people most of the time there are no such transformations. Life carries on being as much of a struggle as it ever was.

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Related links

• Childhood’s End Wikipedia article
• Arthur C. Clarke Wikipedia article

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1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s