CLARKE, Arthur C.
Childhood's End
[Amazon|Powell's] (1953). A visionary,
eschatological novel about Earth's children changing into pure
mentality and joining the Overmind. Clarke is one of the three
best-known contemporary science-fiction writers of his time (the
other two were Asimov and Heinlein) and worth reading in any of his
three moods: extrapolative, poetic, philosophical. Other important
books:
The City and the
Stars (1956) [Amazon|Powell's];
Rendezvous with
Rama [Amazon|Powell's], Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, 1974;
The Fountains of
Paradise [Amazon|Powell's], Hugo, Nebula, 1979; and the novelization of the Stanley
Kubrick film,
2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968) [Amazon|Powell's].
Sunny Jackson on 21 Nov 11Reissued to follow the Syfy Channel film of Riverworld, this fourth book in the classic Riverworld series continues the adventures of Samuel Clemens and Sir Richard Francis Burton as they travel through Farmer's strange and wonderful Riverworld, a place where everyone who ever lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet. Famous characters from history abound. Now Burton and Clemens, who have traveled for more than thirty years on two great ships, are about to reach the end of the River. But there is a religion, The Church of the Second Chance, that has grown up along the River and its adherents, possibly inspired by aliens, are determined to destroy the riverboats. A coming battle may destroy Burton and Clemens, but even if they survive, how can they penetrate the alien tower of the Ethicals, who created this astonishing world? What can humans do against a race capable of creating a world and resurrecting the entire human race on it?
