The Great Romance volume two was found in the Hocken Library in Dunedin, New Zealand. The story follows John Hope, who falls asleep after using a mysterious elixir and wakes up in a utopian future. In this future, humans are all very civil to one another, as required by law. They also have great aspirations for space travel and take Hope to Venus and other planets.

Publishers Weekly went as far as to claim that, "This may have been the first time that anyone described space suits, airlocks or the difficulties of landing on an asteroid or entering a planetary atmosphere." The author is unknown and printed as "The Inhabitant," which only furthers my suspicions that this in fact is fanfic written by an alien visitor.

[NZ Herald]

Here's a good synopsis of Childhood's End:

Aliens come to our planet in gigantic spaceships that blot out the Sun over all the major cities. If you've seen V or Independence Day you've seen this ripped off. The Overlords, as the visitors are called, take over the world without a shot being fired and set about reforming Earth society into a utopia. They keep themselves hidden for the first fifty years of their rule because of they just happen to have horns, bat wings, and barbed tails; but that's no problem because humans have "progressed" so far under the Overlords' rule that they quickly get used to their masters' devilish appearance. What man doesn't realize is that the Overlords are not there to help Earth become a perfect world, but to act as midwives as the children of Earth spontaneously mutate into superbeings who will ultimately merge with an entity called the Overmind and destroy the planet in the process.