Childhood's End

Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke. It follows a peaceful occupation of Earth by the Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.

The Overlords do not appear at first: their ships simply arrive and their instructions are given through a single administrator. Within a generation the world's wars and much of its cruelty have been ended, and the novel follows the people who have to work out what has been taken from them in return. The second half moves forward to the next generation and to the reason the Overlords came.

Clarke wrote the book at the beginning of the 1950s, and it became one of the best-known novels about a benign invasion. It is often read alongside his later work as an early statement of ideas he returned to, and its leap of decades in the middle is what readers tend to remember about its shape and its argument.