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  The Science Fiction of

  Mark Clifton

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  Jerry eBooks

  Title Page

  About Mark Clifton

  Essay: “Why Mark Clifton Matters”

  Bibliography

  SHORT FICTION

  What Have I done?

  Star, Bright

  The Conqueror

  The Kenzie Report

  Bow Down to Them

  Solution Delayed

  Progress Report

  Civilized

  Crazy Joey

  What Thin Partitions

  Reward for Valor

  Hide! Hide! Witch!

  A Woman’s Place

  Sense from Thought Divide

  Clerical Error

  How Allied

  Remembrance and Reflection

  The Dreaded Tomato Addiction

  Do Unto Others

  What Now, Little Man

  Hang Head, Vandal!

  NOVELS

  They’d Rather Be Right

  Eight Keys to Eden

  When They Come From Space

  MARK CLIFTON published only 22 stories and 3 novels, but because he peopled his fiction with fully rounded characters, pierced idiocy and timid complacency with sardonic wit, and observed the human animal with compassion and irony, he altered forever the face of science fiction.

  An innovator of the early 1950s, Clifton was one of the first to etch lines of wisdom and maturity into the youthful visage of commercial science fiction. His subjects were common enough—alien invasion, expanding technology, revolution against political theocracy, space colonization. Clifton “imposed upon these standard themes the full range of sophisticated psychological insight. His obsession was to show truthfully how a cross section of humanity would react to a future alternately mindless and stunning.”

  Even the most fantastic of Clifton’s stories succeed because the first-person narrator always inspires trust. Whether he speaks of poltergeists, alien beings. ESP. or travel through space and time without space ship, the narrator seems sane, believable. In 5 of the 11 stories the narrator follows Clifton’s profession of 20 years—industrial personnel specialist. A clue to the credibility of his fiction emerges from his approach to that job. An apt example is this revealing letter:

  “It was the custom . . . for psych professors, students, and others to come into my office in pretense of applying for work, so that they might learn my interviewing techniques. Within a few sentences they not only confessed their identity, but also confessed they had not intended to reveal it—but that since this had turned into a man to man discussion . . . they now felt free to do so. It never occurred to them that that was the technique that all my interviews were man to man and off the record, and therefore each person felt he could talk freely—without fear.”

  Clifton practiced this same technique and created this same effect in fiction.

  Clifton scorns those who deny phenomena they cannot experience. Through his fiction runs the idea that extraordinary people must pretend to be average lest the average rise up and smite them. In “Clerical Error” scientists must shape their opinions to suit loyalty boards and justice departments. The narrator in “Star Bright” feels he must teach his daughter to hide her immense intelligence—but fortunately she is bright enough to escape into another dimension before the “Stupids” harm her.

  “Hide! Hide! Witch!” tells the Frankenstein legend anew—with one crucial difference; Clifton is not on the side of the ignorant and superstitious who would burn the witch for seeking forbidden knowledge. Like Prometheus. Clifton would risk his liver to bring light; like Eve he would have knowledge, would face eviction rather than dwell in mindless paradise. Clifton is serious, but humorous, too. This particular monster, called Bossy, is a machine that functions as a human and looks vaguely like a cow. And one bureaucrat can say, “I merely see to it that you teachers say nothing which threatens our freedom of speech.”

  A chief object of Clifton’s derision, in fact, is the foolish bureaucrat who hampers those who might break through existing limitations. Bureaucrats create the Poltergeist Division at the Pentagon, just as they initiate an investigation into the one factory that meets both government deadlines and cost estimates. The typical bureaucrat is Dr. Moss of “Clerical Error.” Dr. Moss lacks all creative intuition. His work is technically correct, but incomplete. His case history of a supposedly mad scientist lists the details, but no human being emerges: “Men with minds of clerks could only understand error on a clerical level.” Although he grew increasingly bitter near the end of his career. Clifton believed that at least some could move beyond the clerical level. He wrote for those.

  About half of his work falls into two series: the “Bossy”series, about a computer with artificial intelligence, was written either alone or in collaboration with Alex Apostolides or Frank Riley; and the “Ralph Kennedy” series, which is more comical, and was written mostly solo, including the novel When They Come From Space, although there was one collaboration with Apostolides. Clifton gained his greatest success with his novel They’d Rather Be Right (later republished as The Forever Machine), co-written with Riley, which was originally serialized in Astounding during 1954; and which was awarded the Hugo Award.

  Clifton has been “rediscovered” in recent years, due to his receiving the 2010 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for unjust obscurity.

  Mark Clifton retired from twenty years as a practicing industrial psychologist (mostly personnel entrance and exit interviews) in the early 1950s, partly because of precarious health induced by a heart attack and partly out of a genuine desire to make an individual statement as a writer. Between July 1952 and his death in early 1963 Clifton published three novels and at least twenty stories and novelettes in the science fiction magazines of his time. Nearly a third of his stories were written in collaboration with Alex Apostolides and Frank Riley.

  The first of his novels, They’d Rather Be Right in collaboration with Frank Riley, originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in late 1954 and subsequently won the second science fiction Hugo award for best novel of the year. The others, written alone, were not nearly as successful, and none of them had mass market editions during Clifton’s lifetime.

  During his last six years, Clifton published only four or five of his short stories and the last two novels: When They Came From Space (parts of which were published as “Pawn of the Black Fleet” in Amazing Stories) and Eight Keys to Eden. Well before his death Clifton had ceased to be a major figure in science fiction, pushed to the background and out of print. Although his first cluster of short stories, appearing in Astounding Science Fiction between 1952 and 1955, attracted vast attention and created the impression of enormous prolificacy, the fact is that Clifton’s output, compared with other science fiction writers of his decade, was only moderate. During the last half of his career, public attention steadily waned.

  Clifton, long divorced and lacking either visible relatives or a literary agent, died intestate. Because of this, publishers and anthologists found his works extremely difficult to procure, and consequently, he fell totally out of print almost immediately after his death. Some of his early stories reappeared during the 1970s in compilations from Astounding Science Fiction.

  This is unfortunate but more common than it should be for the writer who works within the context of the commercial genre, “popular” fiction; one could easily reel of
f a list of twenty science fiction writers just as prominent as Clifton in the 1950s who are similarly unknown today. The subsequent course of his career would not have surprised Clifton, however, but probably would have granted him wry amusement. He was a deeply pained and sophisticated man with (toward the end) no illusions regarding the destiny of the science fiction writer or of the lasting nature of his accomplishments.

  What makes Clifton’s topple from the center to the outer regions of science fiction most unfortunate is that he was a writer of genuine importance who did significant work within the form. He changed the field irrevocably, proving to be one of the twelve most influential writers of science fiction during its eighty-four-year commercial publishing history.

  Clifton, like virtually every other science fiction writer of his generation, was a better short story writer than novelist. His novels, in a sense, were afterthoughts: he expanded his stories, puffing up what had originally been conceived as a story-length idea and making it fit a longer form. The novels grew awkwardly. Or sometimes he spliced bits and pieces of his stories together, thus achieving the length, but not really the form, of the novel. It was a procrustean-bed approach not likely to produce lasting literature.

  Clifton was an innovator in the early 1950s and such an impressive innovator that since then his approach has become standard among science fiction writers. He used the common themes of science fiction—alien invasion, expanding technology, revolution against political theocracy, and space colonization—but unlike any writer before him, he imposed upon these standard themes the full range of sophisticated psychological insight. His obsession was to show truthfully how a cross-section of humanity would react to a future alternately mindless and stunning. His view, never particularly optimistic, became steadily blacker as the decade progressed and by “Hang Head, Vandal!”—his last story—his concept of life had grown almost appallingly stark. He did not hold the general run of humanity in higher esteem than did Samuel Clemens in his last bleak years. (But it must be noted that his first published story, “What Have I Done?,” stated at the outset of his career the belief that humanity was inalterably vile.)

  For a variety of reasons, partly despair, partly editorial hostility, Clifton wrote very little toward the end of his career. It is possible to envision him dying an embittered man, destroyed by the perception that science fiction could not be taken seriously because its very audience, largely juvenile, could not assimilate seriousness. But Clifton did not attempt to write in another genre: he either could not or chose not to write anything other than science fiction.

  This was a bad time not only for Clifton, but for science fiction generally, however. The market collapse in the late 1950s, the vanishing of 75 percent of the magazine market, the dwindling audience and public apathy toward science fiction could not have encouraged a writer like Clifton. Nor was Clifton helped by the knowledge that he, the most controversial writer of 1952 and winner of the 1955 best novel award, was to end his life obscure not only to the American reading public but to the tiny, hothouse world of science fiction.

  Clifton decidedly was interested in presenting his message, but he also worked throughout his career at improving his craft. His invention and perception remained at a high level throughout, and his characterization, narrative voice, and story structure began to assume real stature toward the end of his productive years. One of Clifton’s problems undoubtedly was that as he improved, he wrote himself to the borders of the commercial science fiction markets; his work became too sophisticated and individual to find easy access to the magazines and like many other science fiction writers—the late Cyril M. Kornbluth being the best example—Clifton simply took himself out of the markets as a concomitant to his artistic growth. As evidence, consider the fact that Mark Clifton—a major writer of his time, innovator who made a lasting impression on his field, winner of a major award—earned for the totality of his science fiction something considerably less than twenty thousand dollars.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Short Fiction

  “What Have I Done?” Astounding Science Fiction (May 1952)

  “Star, Bright,” Galaxy Science Fiction (July 1952)

  “The Conqueror,” Astounding Science Fiction (August 1952)

  “The Kenzie Report,” Worlds of If (May 1953)

  “Bow Down to Them,” Worlds of If (June 1953)

  “Solution Delayed,” Astounding Science Fiction (July 1953) with Alex Apostolides

  “Progress Report,” Worlds of If (July 1953) with Alex Apostolides

  “Civilized,” Galaxy Science Fiction (August 1953) with Alex Apostolides

  “Crazy Joey,” Astounding Science Fiction (August 1953) with Alex Apostolides

  “What Thin Partitions,” Astounding Science Fiction (September 1953) with Alex Apostolides

  “Reward for Valor,” Universe Science Fiction (September 1953)

  “Hide! Hide! Witch!” Astounding Science Fiction (December 1953) with Alex Apostolides

  “A Woman's Place,” Galaxy Science Fiction (May 1955)

  “Sense From Thought Divide,” Astounding Science Fiction (March 1955)

  “Clerical Error,” Astounding Science Fiction (February 1956)

  “How Allied,” Astounding Science Fiction (March 1957)

  “Remembrance and Reflection,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1958)

  “The Dread Tomato Addiction,” Astounding Science Fiction (February 1958)

  “Do Unto Others,” Worlds of If (June 1958)

  “What Now, Little Man?” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1959)

  “Pawn of the Black Fleet,” Amazing Stories, January and February, 1962.

  “Hang Head, Vandal!” Amazing Stories (April 1962)

  Novels

  They'd Rather Be Right (with Frank Riley), New York: Gnome Press, 1957.

  Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, August through November. 1954.

  Eight Keys To Eden, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1960.

  When They Came From Space, New York: Doubleday and Company. 1962.

  Portions published as “Pawn of the Black Fleet,” Amazing Stories, January and February, 1962.

  SHORT FICTION

  WHAT HAVE I DONE?

  When you’ve finished this bitter little piece, you might decide for yourself whether Clifton s point is valid. But you won t like it!

  It had to be I. It would be stupid to say that the burden should have fallen to a great statesman, a world leader, a renowned scientist. With all modesty, I think I am one of the few who could have caught the problem early enough to avert disaster. I have a peculiar skill. The whole thing hinged on that. I have learned to know human beings.

  The first time I saw the fellow, I was at the drugstore counter buying cigarettes. He w-as standing at the magazine rack. One might have thought from the expression on his face that he had never seen magazines before. Still, quite a number of people get that rapt and vacant look when they can’t make up their minds to a choice.

  The thing which bothered me in that casual glance was that I couldn’t recognize him.

  There are others who can match my record in taking case histories. I happened to be the one who came in contact with this fellow. For thirty years I have been listening to, talking with, counseling people—over two hundred thousand of them. They have not been routine interviews. I have brought intelligence, sensitivity and concern to each of them.

  Mine has been a driving, burning desire to know people. Not from the western scientific point of view of devising tools and rules to measure animated robots and ignoring the man beneath. Nor from the eastern metaphysical approach to painting a picture of the soul by blowing one’s breath upon a fog to be blurred and dispersed by the next breath.

  Mine was the aim to know the man by making use of both. And there was some success.

  A competent geographer can look at a crude sketch of a map and instantly orient himself to it anywhere in the world—the bend of a
river, the angle of a lake, the twist of a mountain range. And he can mystify by telling in finest detail what is to be found there.

  After about fifty thousand studies where I could predict and then observe and check, with me it became the lift of a brow, the curve of a mouth, the gesture of a hand, the slope of a shoulder. One of the universities became interested, and over a long controlled period they rated me 92 percent accurate. That was fifteen years ago. I may have improved some since.

  Yet standing there at the cigarette counter and glancing at the young fellow at the magazine rack, I could read nothing. Nothing at all.

  If this had been an ordinary face, I would have catalogued it and forgotten it automatically. I see them by the thousands. But this face would not be catalogued nor forgotten, because there was nothing in it.

  I started to write that it wasn’t even a face, but of course it was. Every human being has a face—of one sort or another.

  In build he was short, muscular, rather well proportioned. The hair was crew cut and blond, the eyes were blue, the skin fair. All nice and standard Teutonic—only it wasn’t.

  I finished paying for my cigarettes and gave him one more glance, hoping to surprise an expression which had some meaning. There was none. I left him standing there and walked out on the street and around the corner. The street, the store fronts, the traffic cop on the comer, the warm sunshine were all so familiar I didn’t see them. I climbed the stairs to my office in the building over the drugstore. My employment agency waiting room was empty. I don’t cater to much of a crowd because it cuts down my opportunity to talk with people and further my study.

  Margie, my receptionist, was busy making out some kind of a report and merely nodded as I passed her desk to my own office. She is a good conscientious girl who can’t understand why I spend so much time working with bums and drunks and other psychos who obviously won’t bring fees into the sometimes too small bank account.