The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton (Alternatives) - Hardcover

Clifton, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809309858 ISBN 13: 9780809309856

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Synopsis

This collection of the best short stories of Mark Clifton makes these fine tales readily available for the first time in two decades.

 

Winner with Frank Riley of the 1955 Hugo Award for They’d Rather Be Right, Clifton has for a variety of reasons unrelated to the quality of his writing all but disappeared from the aware­ness of today’s science fiction audience. Never a prolific writer he had published only about twenty-five short stories before his death in 1963. But with those stories and his three novels he irrevocably altered the course of contemporary science fiction.

 

Almost single-handedly he introduced the full range of psy­chological insights to the commonly occurring themes of the genre—alien invasion, expanding technology, revolution against political theocracy, and space exploration and coloniza­tion—to ever more truthfully portray how humanity would react to a future that could be either mindless or intellectually stunning.

 

With his first published story, “What Have I Done?” Clifton initiated the theme of a starkly realistic world in which, at its best, humanity is inalterably vile—a theme that became an in­extricable part of all his subsequent works. In his later works Clifton occasionally clothed his bitter indictment in the garb of comedy.

 

The stories collected here include “What Have I Done?” “Star, Bright,” “Crazy Joey,” “What Thin Partitions,” “Sense from Thought Divide,” “How Allied,” “Remembrance and Re­flection,” “Hide! Hide! Witch!” “Clerical Error,” “What Now, Little Man?” and “Hang Head, Vandal!”

About this title

Review

"Indeed, Clifton's proficiency ranks him among the best sf writers of the fifties... A debt of gratitude is owed to Malzberg and Greenberg for letting us see the work of a writer who had the field buzzing in the early to mid-fifties."--Timothy R. Sullivan, Conference on the Fan-tastic, Boca Raton, Florida Indeed, Clifton s proficiency ranks him among the best sf writers of the fifties A debt of gratitude is owed to Malzberg and Greenberg for letting us see the work of a writer who had the field buzzing in the early to mid-fifties. Timothy R. Sullivan, Conference on the Fantastic, Boca Raton, Florida" "Indeed, Clifton's proficiency ranks him among the best sf writers of the fifties... A debt of gratitude is owed to Malzberg and Greenberg for letting us see the work of a writer who had the field buzzing in the early to mid-fifties."--Timothy R. Sullivan, Conference on the Fan-tastic, Boca Raton, Florida

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809309858
• ISBN 13: 9780809309856
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296