I picked up Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End from McKay's this week, because I thought it would be relaxing for my first week of teaching (it was), and because it was the #1 on the 100 Science Fiction Books You Just Have To Read, and I hadn't read it yet.

Basic plot: What happens when the aliens finally show up and take complete control of our affairs? As you can imagine, it goes from there.

The good: Parts of it were truly great. The revelation of the true form of the aliens is suburb, for instance. The entire first 100 pages or so--when humans are first dealing with the Overlords--were fantastic in general.

It was also cool to see the original text that "To Serve Man" and ID-4 were playing off.

The bad: Then the rest of the book happened. It's not just that Clarke didn't keep focus on a small group of characters, as he should have; it's that he completely went off the page in terms of what I was prepared to accept. That's right, fans, this is yet another science fiction tale that's fundamentally materialistic for 7/8 of the story before suddenly getting all mystical for the last eighth. (See also: A.I.;The Matrix Revolutions). It's a betrayal of the reader to suddenly change horses in midstream like this; and it's cheap.

So overall, a cautious review. It was worth at least the $1.80 I paid for it. I just wonder sometimes if I've been spoiled by Philip K. Dick's work, which never betrays your expectations in this way, if only because his books are so mind-bending and paranoid that you have no idea what the hell is going on. You're never secure enough in one mindset to feel the shock of moving to another.

I guess my point is just what I told Fred Chappell last year: I love Dick.