Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews June 14, 2023 June 7, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
Deception is rampant in Childhood's End. Deception is a trick of knowledge; the less you are deceived, and the better you are at deceiving others, the more powerful you are. The best deceivers are, of course, the Overlords, who deceive mankind on dozens of different points. Karellen deceives Stormgren by hiding behind a piece of one-way glass and calling it a "viewscreen" and by planting a tracking device on Stormgren. Stormgren, for his part, sneaks a scanner into Karellen's room and then tries to use a flashlight to see through the glass. Karellen has the greater power, of course, because he is aware of both of Stormgren's deceptions, just as he is (almost certainly) aware of Jan Rodricks's plan to sneak aboard an Overlord vessel many years later.
The Overlords deceive humanity from the start, never revealing their intentions until the children of the last generation begin to mutate into the Overmind. The Overlords visit New Athens under the pretence of inspecting the island, when actually they just want to check up on Jeffrey. Stormgren's kidnappers try their hardest to trick the Overlords. Jan does his best to deceive the Overlords when he sneaks on to their ship. Deception is a major tool of intellectual control, and though the Overlords are the masters of it, it is the primary weapon of both humans and Overlords throughout the novel.
As frequently discussed elsewhere in the summary analyses, Childhood's End often seems like an allegorical tale, a morality play set on a science fiction stage. The play features the arrival of the Antichrist, or Satan (the Overlords), the end of humanity (as it dies out after the Overlords' announcement of the coming of the Overmind), and an Armageddon and assumption of the "faithful" into "Heaven" (as the children of the last generation join the Overmind, destroying the Earth in the process). Considering its unique and transcendental nature, when compared to the rest of Clarke's works, it seems entirely reasonable to look at Childhood's End as a thinly-veiled fable with some significant social commentary (particularly about the nature of utopias), rather than a work of serious science fiction.
Part of the description of the Overmind is that it is a kind of "collective conscious," a being of thought and energy composed of the minds of millions or billions (even trillions?) of other beings, all working as a single entity. As a race, all humans—even those thousands of years before the children of the last generation—have had some latent abilities of this sort. This is what provides the explanation for why the Overlords look so similar to a Christian image of the Devil: humans, as a collective, had a premonition of their ultimate end, and they feared that end. Therefore, they made the participants of that end, the demons, into an object of fear and evil. This collective consciousness also appears in specific people such as Jean and Jan, who often have slight premonitions before major events occur.
Please wait while we process your payment