The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton

· SIU Press
Ebook
296
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

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 the author

Martin H. Greenberg was born in 1942. He received a doctorate in Political Science in 1969 and was a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin until 1995. Over the course of his long and prolific career, Greenberg has published around 1000 anthologies and has worked with numerous best-selling authors including Isaac Asimov, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, Sue Grafton, Scott Turow and Dean Koontz. He has won numerous awards including the Horror Guild Award in 1994, the Deathrealm Award in 1996, the Bram Stoker Award in 1998, and the Prometheus Special Award in 2005. He also received The Ellery Queen Award for lifetime achievement in mystery editing and the Milford Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction editing.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.