Roadside Picnic
The most influential Soviet SF novel: Tarkovsky's Stalker, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Childhood's End about?
Vast ships settle over Earth's cities and the Overlords end war, want and cruelty almost overnight — while declining, for fifty years, to show themselves, for reasons that constitute one of the genre's great reveals. Their true mission is stranger than benevolence: they are midwives for humanity's children, who are about to stop being human at all. The closing movement, in which the last man watches the Earth's children depart and the planet dissolve, is the most sublime ending in science fiction, equal parts triumph and grief.
Why it matters
The definitive transcendence novel and a permanent fixture of all-time-best lists; its imagery of giant ships over cities has been borrowed by everything from V to Independence Day.
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Read next
Speaker for the Dead
Swept the Hugo and Nebula the year after Ender's Game did — an unrepeated double — and established the 'ramen/varelse' hierarchy of alienness that xeno-ethics discussions in the genre still borrow.
Way Station
Hugo winner (1964) and Simak's masterpiece: the definitive statement that first contact might happen quietly, in a farmhouse, over coffee.