Childhood's Doom

[Earlier version published under the title "Beyond the Children"]

A fanfiction which fills in some backstory in Arthur C. Clarke's classic sci-fi novelChildhood's End.

Earthhas been ‘taken over’—no, that’s not the best way of putting it…

Facing imminent doom, Earth has been ‘nursed back to health’—not without some resentment!—by a race of fearsome but benevolent aliens, dubbed ‘The Overlords’, who made first contact with humans in the very nick of time. All goes well and the human race enters what can best be described as a Golden Age. But, a century later, the Over­lords announce their bombshell. How willHomo sapienscope withthat?

For the most part, we follow the apocalyptic events of the following century: the years following the Children’s separation from their parents. Events that would ultimately lead to the total destruction of Planet Earth—a fate averted a century earlier.

But there’s another twist to that ending…

Note: this is an alternative telling ofChildhood’s End. The first contact between humans and the intel­ligent aliens has been moved back into the mid-twenty-first century and significantly altered, with the Earth under circumstances very different from those envisaged by ACC. The named characters in the early part of his novel have been given entirely different personalities and roles. The author hopes that ACC himself would have approved of the changes: he did, after all, re-write the beginning, himself, about forty years after the original publication.