Utopian Wasteland: Abundance, Futurity, and the ‘Golden Age’ in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End
Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) narrates a colonial analogue in which humanity experiences paradigmatic sociocultural shifts under the supposedly benevolent subjugation of the alien Overlords – a period the text declares explicitly to be ‘Utopia [...] at last’ (Clarke 1953 [2010]: 75). My reading examines the hollowness of this claim, whereby the façade of utopia obscures the Overlords’ ultimately apocalyptic intentions for the Earth, thereby producing the conditions and afuturity not of utopia, but of the wasteland – a state of pre-apocalyptic afuturity in which ‘the future has been cancelled’ (Srnicek and Williams 2015: 3). In rejecting the text’s claim to utopia, I draw on contrasts between humanity’s obliviousness to the Overlords’ intentions, and the hyperawareness towards a similar threat explored in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem (2008) to examine the centrality of hope to a utopian imaginary that is, I propose, conspicuously absent from the wasteland of Childhood’s End.