"Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke

An advanced alien race arrives at Earth in the 1970's, bringing peace and prosperity to humanity through the promotion of equality and justice, animal rights, and an end to armed conflict. The aliens (referred to as "overlords") are secretive about their purpose and origin, which remains a mystery until the latter part of the novel, where it is revealed that humans are a "chosen" race capable of transcendence into a higher state of being or evolution, and that the overlords are there to witness and provide support to the human race during the transformation, themselves overseen by an even more advanced alien entity, the "overmind".

The story is told through a series of characters spanning approximately 150 years including, Rikki Stormgren, the secretary general of the united nations, George Greggson and Jean Morrel, the parents of the first child to experience transcendence and Jan Rodericks, an adventurous astronomer who stows away on an overlord starship bound for the overlord homeworld and becomes the last human being alive. Generally speaking, Clarke's characters are fairly uninteresting and are really only there to move the larger-scale plot along, i.e. a hypothetical account of advanced aliens visiting Earth in peace. The story starts off pretty slow; I found most of the first half of the novel fairly uninspiring; it didn't seem to go anywhere, except to build up the suspense behind the overlords revelling their physical form, which was a fairly ho-hum revelation. That said, things picked up towards the latter part of the book, where the epic scope makes for very interesting reading. Aspects of the book felt a bit dated, such as Clarke's adamance about gender and racial equality following humanity's enlightenment only to be followed be gender-stereotypical interactions between the characters (i.e. George's affair, Maia (Jan's sister) as the object of desire at the dinner party, Clarke's commentary on marriage and men/women through his characters).

Overall "Childhood's End" was mostly an easy read and nice and short. I'm glad I've read it, at least to have a background knowledge of what is considered one of the best science fiction stories (at least historically).

I found some really cool conceptual art for the novel here.