Gender Roles In Childhood's End

An evolving cultural dialogue between political, philosophical, literary and social spheres greatly characterises the Utopian genre. Literary utopias negotiate the condition of modernity and ponder its implications for the future of mankind. For that reason alone, Utopia’s contemporaneity renders it a genre capable of adapting to the demands of time.

Influential texts in the utopian dialectic are unique negotiations between Utopia, reality and the desires of the author. This is evidenced in Thomas More’s Socratic dialogue between Raphael Hythloday and himself within ‘Utopia’, modelling the civil discussion of relevant issues concerning Utopia and the real world and establishing dual perspectives. Hythloday embodies More’s awareness of the …show more content…
Clarke employs the metaphor of childhood to illustrate the naivety of mankind in the face of the great technological progress and intellectual ferment during Clarke’s age. Utopia in this context is a vehicle for critical commentary on the complications that arise from a utopia, namely, artistic stagnation, the depreciation of creativity, boredom leading to moral depravity, and the ultimate elimination of evolution. ‘Childhood’s End’ presents a Utopia that cannot satisfy the human aspiration for ultimate transcendence, as apparent in the novel’s conclusion, in which mankind has outgrown Utopia and its own form as homo sapiens. In Clarke’s vision of invasion the narrative of Utopia functions as a theatre of the repressed and of world destruction, alluding to the role of the Overlords and their benevolent despotism as symbolic of the superficial nature of technological advancement. Therein lies the central assertion of ‘Childhood’s End,' for the liberal imperialism of Clarke’s Overlords who conquer and create Utopia is a parallel drawn to that of the contemporaneous imperialism of nation-states like the USSR and the …show more content…
Despite being subject to the conventional iconography of science fiction, the narrative echoes More’s ‘Utopia’ in the subtle satire of its respective historical context and furthermore carries on the tradition of utopia being ‘no-place’ in foreseeable time or space. More’s implied criticism of the values of civic humanism, the common Renaissance attitudes of intellectual obsession towards the classical world and Neoplatonism as well as the hypocrisy of Christian monarchies that govern in contradiction of their faith, runs alongside Clarke’s parody of the imperialism and pessimistic attitudes to technological progresses that underly the Cold War