Childhood's End

If you've never read Arthur C. Clarke's classic science fiction novel Childhood's End, you owe it to yourself.  It wraps up several sci-fi tropes – interstellar travel, first alien contact, ESP phenomena, and the destiny of mankind – into one 1953 masterwork of the genre.  Don't skip ahead, and for heaven's sake, don't read the Wikipedia summary of the novel.  It'll spoil the jaw-dropping big reveal a third of the way through when the aliens first show themselves to humanity, and you want to to save that for when it comes around.  No really, trust me on this, you want to save the moment and get the full jaw-drop experience for yourself.

Having said "read the book already," I know that some people won't get around to it, or just aren't that big of science fiction fans.  For them, the story is available in two adaptations.

On screen, the Syfy Channel released it as a miniseries in 2015.  It's... not bad.  They certainly got the aliens right, to the degree that when the big reveal comes, even knowing what was coming, actually seeing it unfold on screen once again made my jaw drop.  They get bonus points there.  But a lot of the rest of this adaptation feels like a Hallmark Channel pot-boiler romance.  What's more they blew the crucial ouija board scene, turning it into a hack "overwrought woman screams and faints" moment, with lots and lots of CGI.  I mean, it's just a damn ouija board people.  Pick one up for a buck at a yard sale and film the scene right.

So, 2.5 out of 4 stars for the mini-series.  They did get the motion capture augmented costumes for the aliens exactly right, and at least the story pretty well progresses much along the same lines of the book.

The next option is to download and listen to the two hour radio play adaptation done by the BBC in 1997.  It's pretty good (hey, they worked the ouija board scene in), though the first half is pretty choppy in its storytelling.  The big reveal on the aliens comes at the very start of the second hour, so block out enough time to at least get that far.  The alien auto-translate is kind of corny and, well frankly, we have better tech for this today than these super-advanced aliens have in this radio play.  BTW, in the book the aliens are so smart that they just learn to speak human languages on the fly, so this should never have been a thing in the radio play at all.  For all that, it's a better adaptation than the job the Syfy Channel did eighteen years later, and it's a good two hours spent.  Call it... 3.5 out of 4 stars.  Here's a link to a free download site for the radio play.

And the book itself is of course 4 out of 4 stars.  It's one of those classics of science fiction, and if I had to write a "best of all time, forever" list, it would be in the top three.

Final note: Don't read ahead, don't look at clips from the Syfy miniseries, don't cheat yourself out of the big reveal when the head alien steps off the ship.  You want to save that moment for when you get there in the story.