Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were more skeptical, and faulted the novel's "curious imbalance between its large-scale history and a number of episodic small-scale stories." While praising Clarke's work as "Stapledonian its historic concepts and also for the quality of its prose and thinking," they concluded that "Childhood's End" was "an awkward and imperfect book." P. Schuyler Miller said the novel was "all imagination and poetry," but concluded it was "not up to some of Clarke's other writing" due to weakness in its "episodic structure."