Entertaining, that is, except in the hands of Syfy channel. As long as one is OK with this limited concept of literature, his stories can be entertaining and engrossing, particularly in one's juvenile years. Ideas and engineering details mattered more to Clarke than persons or even humanity. He related spending days crunching orbital calculations as part of authoring one of his early stories. Clarke's engineering background made him obsessive about technical details, sometimes to the detriment of story telling, so for those of us who can't tolerate hand waving about warp drives, Clarke is the antidote.
The all-important and distinguishing trademark of sf, its sense of wonder, was to be found in spades in Clarke, including in this story. Turning to the good in the book, Clarke, like his inspiration Olaf Stapledon, had some grand ideas about vast spaces and deep time. Even Stanley Weinbaum, Clarke's short-lived Golden Age contemporary, wrote better alien characters way back in the pulp era. I don't imagine Clarke spent much time sitting about Paris cafes whilst empathetically trying to put himself in the minds and shoes of others. All his characters read like aspects of one character, which is presumably Clarke. There are very few women and they're psychologically no different than the men, which may explain Clarke's own engineering failure with the fairer sex. Beginning with the bad of the novel, any honest appraisal of Clarke's work needs to recognize that the man was no Dostoevsky: his characterizations tend towards cardboard cutouts, bureaucrats and technocrats running about grand projects, giving us blurbs of Clarke's often pedantic thought dressed up as dialog.
Like most who are going to watch this, I've read Childhood's End (CE) several times. The real problem is however the story and how it's made worse in this TV re-imagining. As other reviewers have pointed out, this TV movie has some serious continuity errors and like most TV sf it's derivative. Because it will be a lot less boring than this movie. If on the other hand you want great literature and serious adult philosophical discussion about the good questions posed by this story then take a philosophy class.
Still, if you like decent sf, then read the book and don't waste your time with this dumbed-down TV version. In summary: the novel is a fun read for sf fans because of its concepts, but like much of sf it lacks any serious understanding of human nature or great philosophical issues.
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