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The Return of The King
"For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."
"His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom."
Childhood's End
"There were things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded."
"No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become disoriented with powers and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart."
Head-to-Head
Characters: The now-broken Fellowship helped to forge a genre's identity. The interactions between Frodo and Sam, in this book especially, are the most complex (even if they're entirely morally unambiguous).
The interactions in Childhood's End, though, are top notch: Rikki Stormgren and Karellen have an endearing relationship, Jan Rodricks is a beacon for human curiosity and his endgame relationship with the Overlords is heavily symbolic and interesting. It's not all grandiose; Rupert Boyce is a caricature of a rich party animal and George Greggson is the everyman.
Both are stellar, but Clarke gets a lot more depth in fewer pages.
Advantage: Childhood's End.
Setting: Hey, new category! Middle Earth is one of the fullest, most developed settings that literature has ever seen. Childhood's End features some neat landscapes (spacescapes?), but they're much more bare-bones than Tolkien's creation.
Advantage: Return of the King.
Plot: The plot in Childhood's End is important more for the questions it poses than for what-happens-and-to-who. Return of The King features a delayed, yet satisfying end to a feat of epic writing. Hard to argue this one.
Advantage: Return of the King.
Ending: Said it before, and I'll say it again: Clarke is a brilliant writer, but he should be kept as far away as possible from the conclusion of any piece of fiction.
Advantage: Return of the King, by default.
Language/Writing: Clarke's writing is as plain and simple as I've seen in a sci-fi writer (noting that I mean this as a compliment, really). Tolkien is voluminous, and although his descriptiveness is occasionally overused, it's as sharp as any elven sword when he's describing the tense battles and events that close the trilogy.
Advantage: Push: one for effective use of brevity, and one for effectively having never heard of it.
Philosophy: What does the end of the road look like for human intelligence? For human conflict? For human life? It doesn't get much weightier than that, and the questions are blended seamlessly into a pretty solid story.
Advantage: Childhood's End.
Winner Winner Turkey Supper
This is probably the first time that, after closer analysis, I ended up picking a different book than I'd picked before starting the blog. I love the philosophical musings and themes that run in Childhood's End enough that I'd probably say I like the book more—but, insofar as the facets of the books go, Return of The King just offers more. It's a paper-thin margin and if you ask me which book is better 100 times, I'd probably answer each one 50 times depending on whether I felt like thinking or whether I felt like a good story.
Return of The King moves to the third round.
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