It only took me a week to devour Arthur C Clarke's tale Childhood's End. When you look back on it against the plethora of speculative fiction that became published since, you can trace back much inspiuration to this book, and of course, see where much of its inspiration came from by those publications that came before.
Like most speculative fiction, it isn't a tale of boy meets girl, but rather, it is a tale of incredibly intelligent and apparently benevolent forces meet earthlings, and then what follows is not a war, but instead a gradual increase in the quality of human life, until there's an age of plenty.
A golden era for human leisure, education, and surprisingly - not hedonism. Instead, all the borders of nations are erased. Everyone gets along. All religions are replaced by rationality, and humanity seems to be going along wonderfully.
Of course, there's patches of rebellions, and the apparently benevolent "Overlords" (as they're named by humans) - are fair, reasonable, but not without boundaries to humanity.
First, they don't want people to leave the planet, or go beyond the Earth.
And this is where the book becomes very interesting. It's broken up into four distinct parts. First, a reflection on the arrival of the Overlords, followed by the monotomy of planetary administration. Then comes the conflict; a human party where, after fifty years of otherwise concealing their physical forms, an Overlord happens to be at a party where a device much like a Ouija board happens to unveil some pertinent information.
The paranormal proceeds to enter the tale, and a man chooses to follow this seemingly irrational path to then discover things about the very nature of the universe.
The thing about Arthur C Clarke is that everything I've read is so easy. It is easy to understand his prose, and his text carries the story along with excellent, meditative pacing. By no means a thriller; there's enough present to keep you turning pages, but not enough to keep you up late at night.
Until you get to some of the shattering revelations of the nature of the universe in this fictional tale, and then you may end up feeling simultaneously insignificant, cherished, valued, and ... hopeless at the onslaught of time; which plays a large role in this story.
For something that is only about 260 pages long, it touches on so much about the ethics of inter-species interaction, the very alienating nature of life beyond the Earth, and the tiny speck that man is in the greater cosmos.
The closing chapter in particular is incredible, rapid, and a fitting conclusion to the tale.
Insights galore, memorable story beats, and a sense of wonder and mystery permeates the book. It is wonderful, easy to read, and has me lining up at my bookshelf to pick up the next Arthur C Clarke book that I own.
I'll read many more before I'm done.