Childhood's End

Book takes a weird PhilDickian genre turn near the end that I hated, but makes up for it in the last few chapters. Started as decently hard sci-fi and pivoted jarringly into soft territory.

Very clearly a prime inspiration for Cixin Liu's Remembrance trilogy (modern day masterpiece, best SF series ever, fite me) and I loved seeing the parallels.

Prose is fantastic, characters interesting, and dialogue solid. Immersive and wonderful.

There is a super unfortunate N-bomb dropped in the middle in the most old white-guy way possible. It's weird.