Childhood's End

Huge starships park above Earth's cities without warning. The beings aboard, called the Overlords, take control and rule gently. Within a generation, war, poverty and cruelty are gone. Their supervisor, Karellen, speaks to humanity through a single man, the UN Secretary-General Rikki Stormgren, and he will not say what the Overlords want or let anyone see them.

Fifty years later, Jan Rodricks decides to find out. He hides aboard a supply ship and makes a forty light-year trip to the Overlords' home world. While he is away, Earth's children begin to change, first the Greggson children and then all the others, and their minds develop in ways no human mind has.

The Overlords themselves answer to the Overmind, a cosmic intelligence that has used them against their will to guide other species through their own transformations. Jan returns to a planet where children are no longer born as before. He is the last true human, and he watches the final generation join into one vast consciousness and leave, taking the planet's substance along.

Published in 1953, this science fiction reads as a philosophical novel of ideas rather than an action story. The tone is calm and increasingly eerie, and the question it turns on is what a perfect society might cost.