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Childhood's End -- apparently indebted to Kurd Lasswitz's Utopian romance, Auf Zwei Planeten ( 1897 ), and also to Wells's Histories Of The Future, especially, The World Set Free ( 1914 ) and The Shape Of Things To Come ( 1933 ) -- describes the bloodless conquest of earth by the Overlords, vastly superior creatures who come to our world in order to prepare the human race for its next stage of development, an eventual merging with the composite mind of the universe.

Arriving just in time to stop men from turning their planet into a radioactive wasteland, the Overlords unite earth into one world in which justice, order, and benevolence prevail and ignorance, poverty, and fear have ceased to exist.

Under their rule, earth becomes a technological utopia.

Both abolition of war and new techniques of production, particularly robot factories, greatly increase the world's wealth, a situation described in the following passage, which has the true utopian ring: `` Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free, provided as a public service by the community, as roads, water, street lighting and drainage had once been.

A man could travel anywhere he pleased, eat whatever he fancied -- without handing over any money ''.

With destructive tensions and pressures removed men have the vigor and energy to construct a new human life -- rebuilding entire cities, expanding facilities for entertainment, providing unlimited opportunities for education -- indeed, for the first time giving everyone the chance to employ his talents to the fullest.

Mankind, as a result, attains previously undreamed of levels of civilization and culture, a golden age which the Overlords, a very evident symbol of science, have helped produce by introducing reason and the scientific method into human activities.

Thus science is the savior of mankind, and in this respect Childhood's End only blueprints in greater detail the vision of the future which, though not always so directly stated, has nevertheless been present in the minds of most science-fiction writers.