Kuttner died of a heart attack in his sleep, Kornbluth died of either a massive cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack (depending upon whose version you accept), Clifton had had a bad heart for a long time. It drove him out of industry and undid him at a relatively young age. But I think that the death certificates of all three should have listed science fiction under cause of death. H. Beam Piper, our only suicide, blew out his brains with a shotgun in the fall of 1964, but it did not appear to be the field itself that had done it to him: the sudden death of his agent, monies tied up, depression, a big gun collection. Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Clifton took it straight.
Cause of death: science fiction. You bet, Mark.
* * *
Kuttner and Kornbluth remain fairly prominent more than two decades after their passage (Kornbluth largely through the collaborations with Frederik Pohl and Pohl's devoted effort to keep his collaborations and collaborator in print; Kuttner because enough contemporary writers and editors remember his ten best stories enough to constantly anthologize them), but Clifton is a lost figure and it is he who needs an amicus curiae, court of last resort or not. His 1956 novelette "Clerical Error" was reprinted in Neglected Visions (and I should say they were and are; the book did not do well but the title was self-fulfilling prophecy), a Doubleday anthology coedited with Martin H. Greenberg, and under Greenberg's aegis and my own his first collection of short stories in his own language has recently been published by Southern Illinois University Press, but these frail attempts at restoration are absolutely on the margin. Clifton is unknown not only to the contemporary science fiction audience but to its writers and editors; most editors under thirty have never heard of him, most writers under forty have never read him. This is unpleasant—who of us could find this a reasonable outcome? Even Amazing's mid-fifties stable of space-typists had their pride and reasonable ambitions and some fulfilled them—but it becomes genuinely wrenching when it is stated flatly (and the old-timers will verify) that for a period of four years Mark Clifton was perhaps the most prominent and controversial science fiction writer through the entire range of the magazines . . . and the early fifties for science fiction was a magazine market.
Clifton retired in 1951 after two decades as a practicing industrial psychologist (he did employment interviews and did interviews of recalcitrant workers as part of management's attempt, apparently, to control unionism), partly because of precarious health after an early heart attack and partly out of a genuine desire to not only be a writer but a science fiction writer. Between May 1952 and his death Clifton published three novels and about twenty-five short stories in the science fiction magazines, nearly a third of them written in collaboration with Frank Rylovich and Alex Apostolides. (There is some question as to how much input the collaborators really had; Rylovich published a few stories in Worlds of If, one of which was in a best-of-the-year collection, but Apostolides, at least under that name, published nothing elsewhere before or since.) The first of the novels, They'd Rather Be Right (published later by Gnome Press as The Forever Machine) in collaboration with Rylovich, won the second science fiction novel Hugo awarded in 1955 at the Cleveland World Convention; the other two, When They Came from Space (1962) and Eight Keys to Eden (1960), were hardly as successful.
Most of the short stories upon which his reputation was based were published in the first four years of Clifton's career. Over his last six years only a few stories saw print (none in Astounding, his major market), along with the unsuccessful later novels. Well before his death, in other words, Clifton had ceased to be a major figure. Diminished output was certainly the reason but whether the output was truly diminished or whether Clifton was merely being heavily rejected is speculative. It is possible (I have no direct evidence but private correspondence to another writer which I have seen may indicate) that as with Cyril M. Kornbluth, Clifton's increasing ambition and sophistication caused him to write himself clear out of the magazine markets of his time . . . which were in the later fifties in a period of attrition and eventually collapsed anyway.
Long divorced and with a daughter who is (to this day) unlocatable, Mark Clifton died intestate. This made it impossible for publishers or anthology editors to negotiate for his work for years, and by the time that the newly formed SFWA and Forrest J. Ackerman had gotten some hold on the situation by the late sixties many years had passed and Clifton's time was lost. "What Have I Done?" in the Harrison-Aldiss Astounding/Analog Reader and "Clerical Error" in Neglected Visions are two of the very few reprintings of his work in the seventies and although the Donning Company, a small publisher, has announced its intention to republish The Forever Machine, that novel has, at this writing, been out of print in this country for at least two decades.
This litany, a Yizkor chant, which with minor revisions could be said over the graves of most of us (and in due course, I can assure, will be said over all of us), is what the writing of popular fiction is all about, to be sure. It would be easy to reel off the names of twenty science fiction writers almost as prominent as Clifton in his decade who are similarly unknown today. But what makes Clifton's topple from the center so painful is that within the context of the field in his time he had far to fall and it must have been extremely painful for him because it all happened during his lifetime. By the end of the fifties, barely able to write, hardly able to sell, he had already lost the entire sense of his career.
And he was good.
He was, in fact, in a particular way the best of them all. Clifton knew what technology was going to do to people; he spotted the fifties as the decade when those effects would become institutionalized, and he wrote about angst, the alienation effect, and the seepage of the human spirit through the machines with detachment, precision, and a good deal of control. Never better than an adequate stylist, he painfully improved his technique through the years and by the mid-fifties was writing quite well, far above the range of most contributors to Astounding. It was at that point that he began to get into sales trouble.
What the private correspondence indicates is that Clifton, a pained and sophisticated man who came into science fiction as an artistic naïf seeing it as the medium which would change the world, and who went out of it a decade later bitterly convinced that the nature of its editors and its audience forever delimited the field and made it beneath contempt as a serious means of social or political thought . . . what this correspondence indicates is that Clifton, whose career paralleled the decade in its collapse from optimism to despair, understood everything that had happened to him and would not have been surprised at all by his subsequent obscurity. What comes off in those letters is a powerful sense of disgust and self-loathing—Clifton hated himself for ever having invested science fiction with expectation. In the early fifties he saw it as mutant literature for mutant, special types who bound together would order the cosmos, and by the mid-fifties he was railing about the parasitic behavior of the West Coast fans who attached themselves to a notably immature and unsophisticated literary agent, all of them calling for the return of science fiction to the creed of adventure.
The letters are extraordinarily interesting in their portrait of a first-rate mind of mature wisdom proceeding very rapidly from self-delusion to existential despair. It is a sad thing—but in honoring the dead also, perhaps, an act of great compassion—that they must never be published.
Like virtually every science fiction writer of his time—The Science Fiction Encyclopedia points this out in an alert essay on Cyril Kornbluth—Clifton showed a curious inability to do his best work at novel length. This may have had to do with the exigencies of the magazine market or with the fact that virtually all of the science fiction of the fifties was conceived and written for magazine publication and subsequently pushed and pulled, manipulated into novel length; it may have had to do with the fact that science fiction at that time was a medium most adaptable to the short story, the single extrapolation worked to a single point. Whatever the reasons, they applied in Clifton's case. His first novel (with Riley), The Forever Machine, an outright padding of thin material, was based upon short story characters and situations which had run in 1953 in Astounding. Even by the less than rigorous standards of those times, this work must be recognized as seriously attenuated. The short stories on the other hand were thoughtful and controlled; the later ones quite poised and graceful and at least "Clerical Error," "What Have I Done," and "What Now, Little Man?" must be regarded as central to the literature. They were endlessly influential and imitated; they live on even as do "Vintage Season" or "All You Zombies" as the basis of further work by writers less original.
* * *
Despite the understated and occasionally clumsy style, Clifton was as innovative as Cyril Kornbluth or Alfred Bester in what he did for the field: he used the common themes—alien invasion, encroaching technology, revolution against impenetrable bureaucracy—but he brought to them the full range of psychological insight available to a trained and sophisticated mind. His view of how individuals would deal with the institutions and devices of the technological night was never optimistic (his very first story, "What Have I Done?" depicts humanity as inalterably vile) but became steadily blacker as the decade and his own career progressed, and "Hang Head, Vandal!" his last published story, is a vision of appalling bleakness. The vandals who wrecked Mars were all of us and Clifton, putting his last two novels on the market shortly thereafter, proceeded, it would seem, not to write. He died less than two years later. The correspondence to which I have referred ceased . . . his correspondent stopped answering his letters.
There is more to be said of Clifton and someday someone will say it (those letters might be published), but here is the last to be said of him here: Mark Clifton, a major writer of his time, protege of Campbell, Hugo winner, master of psionics, envy of the fans and colleagues for his shotgun career . . . Mark Clifton, that innovator and man of wisdom, earned for all of his science fiction in his lifetime something considerably less than twenty thousand dollars.
—1980: New Jersey
September 1973:
What I Did Last Summer
What I did last summer. I did many things last summer. I wrote three novels in the Berkley Lone Wolf series. I did some short stories. I did a novelization of the Lindsay Anderson film O Lucky Man! but it's never going to be published, unfortunately, because Lindsay Anderson wants to do his own version with stills from the picture. Boy was I mad! Not as mad as Warner Books, though, who are out twenty-five-hundred dollars. I'm not giving it back, Jack. Those are some of the things I did last summer. I went to Saratoga with my family and lost three hundred dollars. I got a new Calais Coupe and drove it all over Bergen and Rockland counties looking for a way out. (No luck.) But the important and memorable thing I did last summer was to write a science fiction novel.
It is called Tactics of Conquest and Pyramid Books will publish it in January. I have already seen it in galleys; it is what they call a rush job. A copy editor called me last week to check a certain term and to ask if I had ever heard of Bobby Fischer, adding, "By the way this is a very good novel, not at all like science fiction." Was it exciting to hear that! But of course it is just like science fiction. I wrote it in four days for a four-thousand-dollar advance. It is fifty-five-thousand words.
Here is how I got to write the novel: an editor named Roger Elwood got a contract with Pyramid Books to deliver twelve science fiction novels and he called on me to do one. Whew! Before I had even said yes he handed me a contract and it called for two thousand dollars right then. I didn't even have to offer any material. Or a plot outline or synopsis or anything. Just sign the contracts in June promising to deliver the novel by August 1 because Roger Elwood needed to deliver his first book fast. I was proud. Two thousand dollars for signing your name makes you proud. But then I knew that I had to write a whole novel in less than a month by the time the two thousand dollars came into my hands and I got scared. I never write anything until the money gets into my hands. That is the smart and shrewd way to deal when you are mostly working in paperback original.
It sure is scary writing a novel on a one-month deadline. But I knew what to do. Even though it is only six and a half years since my first sale to Galaxy, I am an experienced science fiction writer with a lot of novels to my credit and the first thing you need is to write a novel fast, particularly in science fiction, where you can't fill up the pages with fornication like in the other stuff, is to have something to base it on. It is always easier to rework something already written. For one thing it reminds you that you got the thing done once somehow and can do it again, and for another it gives you something to hang on to.
So I decided to expand a twenty-six-hundred-word short story I had written last November called "Closed Sicilian," which I sold to Fantasy and Science Fiction for eighty dollars. It was a chess story describing a fool's mate in four moves from the point of view of the fool, who is so arrogant that he doesn't know what has happened to him, even at the end. I based the story on the world chess championship matches during the summer of 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Bobby Fischer, who beat poor Boris Spassky, struck me as being an interesting character for a short story narrator since he had no insight at the same time that he was megalomaniacal. Also I had spent all this time staring at the television where they got the moves in from Iceland one by one and had experts talking about them. I had to do something to justify all of that staring, right? Because science fiction is the only thing I know how to sell (other than mysteries and pornography and novelizations that Lindsay Anderson won't let go through), I framed it as a science fiction story, so I had my narrator and opponent playing for the fate of the universe with the aliens as referees. I have done this kind of thing before and dealing with aliens controlling the fate of the universe gave me a warm, comfortable feeling as I sat down at the typewriter on Tuesday afternoon, August 2 or 3 it must have been. "What are you going to do now?" a neighbor had asked me a few minutes before while I was standing outside looking at the trees as if for the last time. "I'm going to write a novel in four days," I said. "You don't mean that," the neighbor said and giggled. I could tell that she thought I was crazy but that didn't bother me. Everyone here where I live who has heard that I am a science fiction writer thinks that I am crazy, except those who think I am really a criminal or dirty movie distributor. After all, none of them have ever seen my books. I mentioned the story length.
Now you may think that you would have trouble expanding a twenty-six-hundred-word story into a fifty-five-thousand-word novel. You would be right. My oh my did I pad and overload! Sentences became pages, paragraphs became chapters. Megalomania became grandiosity with lots of examples. Whole flashback chapters were devoted to his life as a chess champion: scenes in Berne and Moscow and Philadelphia, the traveling life of the chess master. Also some sex scenes, but within good taste because this is the science fiction market. It turns out that the narrator has really had a secret homosexual relationship with his opponent for years but it is said in a subtle way.
Roger Elwood, when I delivered the novel, wanted the narrator and his opponent to be the same person but I said nothing doing. I have my integrity. I did write the epilogue he wanted, though, where the world gets destroyed. For four thousand dollars you don't get sticky. It is the biggest advance I ever got in my life.
I wrote the novel in four days filling in all of the background and details that the short story implied. I smoked many cigarettes—I know this is bad and I'll cut down soon—and drank ten ounces of scotch a day, five before lunch and five before dinner. Also beer. It helped me not to vomit when I ate and did I eat! When I finished the novel, it was late Friday; I said to myself, you've worked four days and made four thousand dollars. That is smart. That is good. Who makes a thousand dollars a day in Bergen County? Not even shrinks or crime bosses make a thousand a day. At least, not consistently.
I was so proud. I had shown the world what a fine writer I was and Roger Elwood and Pyramid Books how quick. I knew they would appreciate it. I mailed the novel to Roger and he called me and said he liked it so much he would like me to do another Pyramid novel. So now I am thinking of what I can do. I think I will expand my story "A Galaxy Called Rome," which I also wrote last summer. I can fill in on that too, and this story is nine thousand words, not twenty-six hundred, which makes it easier to bloat. Roger only wants to pay me thirty-five-hundred dollars for this one though because Tactics of Conquest and the new program at Pyramid have to prove themselves in the market. I think I'll take it. That is still almost nine hundred dollars a day and who in Bergen County is making nine hundred dollars a day? I am smart and shrewd and doing better than almost any thirty-four-year-old in Bergen County. That is what I did last summer and what I will do this fall, and next summer too until I make so much money that I can stop doing all of this and really enjoy my life. I know that I will enjoy my life once I can relax but first I have to do this "Galaxy Called Rome" thing, and then I will get back to the Lone Wolf stuff. I am going to end this composition now because I am very tired and you only asked for fourteen hundred words on what I did last summer and here they are and I hope my fourteen-dollar check will be payable on receipt because I really need the money. I really do. I always will. I'll make sure of it.
—1980: New Jersey
The Cutting Edge
Everyone plays with ten-best lists; science fictioneers are no exception,32 but here is a modest proposal: the ten best science fiction stories of all time. Whether it is possible to define a ten (or even a hundred) "best" is arguable; the qualifications and criteria of the compiler are pressed every step of the way but that the job should be done for the short story too is non disputandum.
Science fiction, at the cutting edge, has always flourished in the short story. Perhaps the genre by definition will sustain its best work in that form; here a speculative premise and a protagonist upon whose life that premise is brought to bear can be dramatically fused with intensity. Novels tend to be episodic or bloated; even novellas tend to say too much or too little, but the short story—traditionally defined as a work of prose fiction of less than fifteen thousand words—has from the outset comprised as a body most of the best work in this field. While science fiction in its modern inception has produced possibly ten novels that might be called masterpieces, it has given no less than several hundred short stories that would justify that difficult and presumptuous label. Henry James defined the short story as in its purest state being about one person and one thing and it is within that compass that science fiction achieves rigor and its proper form. (It should be noted that almost all of the disputed masterpieces that would appear on most of the ten-best-novel lists were expanded or assembled from short stories . . . Budrys's Rogue Moon, Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Sturgeon's More Than Human, for instance. Although one is dangerously surmising author intention, it would be a fair guess that these were originally conceived as short stories and only worked obiter dicta into novels, lending further justification to the view of science fiction as a short story form.)
Too, it is in America in the twentieth century that the short story has reached its apotheosis; our one great contribution to world culture might be the American short story, which has become a wondrous and sophisticated medium. The confluence of the American short story and that uniquely American form modern science fiction would result in a ten-best list with which anyone would reckon.
Herewith this list with the usual qualifications and cautions: The stories themselves are not ranked in order of descending merit (it is foolish enough to find a top ten without going on to arrange them); the judgment is based upon literary excellence (seminal stories such as Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" as influences upon the genre have had far greater effect than most of the stories on this list, but the work is being judged sui generis) and, of course, as a single informed opinion it is liable to provoke challenge and dispute, not least of all from the list-maker himself, who a year or two from now might want to change three quarters of it . . . or ten years from now might agree that work yet to be written has displaced several of these stories. Whether or not our best work is ahead of us, a lot of good work is still ahead:
1) "Vintage Season," by C. L. Moore (Astounding Science Fiction, 1946). Published as by "Lawrence O'Donnell," the second most important (after "Lewis Padgett") of the Kuttners' pseudonyms, this story is now known to have been one of the very few of their eighteen-year marriage and collaboration to have been written by Catherine Moore alone. The vision of future cultural decadence imposed (through time-traveling researchers who specialize in attending plagues, torment, and disasters of history) upon an earlier (undefined) period that in its own decadence foreshadows this version of the future, its languorous pace, concealed but artful, and manipulated erotic subtext and stylistic control probably distinguish it as the single best short story to emerge from the decade. It has been rewritten endlessly and has directly influenced hundreds of short stories and at least two dozen novels, but none of its descendants have improved upon the basic text. Its only flaw—as Damon Knight pointed out twenty years ago—is a denouement that carries on too long between the revelation and the flat, deadly last line; it is bathetic and overextended and for the sake of good form should have been severely cut. It is not a serious flaw because it enables the reader only to marvel at the spareness of this eighteen-thousand-word story to that point; it has the density and emotional impact of a novel.
2) "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) (Final Stage, 1974). The judge must plead his own problem at the outset and throw himself on the mercy of a higher court: I commissioned this story for an original anthology co-edited with Edward L. Ferman and published it first. Final Stage was a written-to-order anthology in which various writers were asked to write a story on one of the great themes of science fiction, Tiptree (Sheldon) was asked for an End of the World story and delivered one of the very few masterpieces that did not originate with the writer. (Editorial involvement or the assignment of theme often results in good stories and sometimes improves good stories to better-than-good, but masterpieces almost necessarily have to self-generate and will themselves through.)
This postapocalypse story in which the end of the world becomes a metaphor for the shocks and injuries of existence which prefigure and replicate death (and make the state of death their eternal reenactment) is almost unknown today; it appears only in the out-of-print Final Stage in hardcover and paperback and an out-of-print Tiptree collection, Star Songs of an Old Primate. It will reward the most careful study, and Tiptree's afterword to the story—also commissioned, as were all of the afterwords in the collection—is a brief but beautifully written essay on the real meaning of science fiction on whose ideas I have based the title essay of this book.
3) "Particle Theory," by Edward Bryant (Analog, 1977). The protagonist, a physicist, is dying of cancer, his emotional life is in decay and the astronomical phenomena which he observes clearly foreshadow the end of the world . . . all three levels of destruction here fuse, echo one another, are bound together in a story of astonishing excellence which fully meets the criteria of a great science fiction story: its science and scientific premise are locked into the text and grant the emotional force; without the scientific element the story would collapse, yet it is this speculation's shift into individual pain and consequence which clarify it scientifically. The seventies were science fiction's richest decade in the short story; although more good stories were published in the fifties, the top 1 or 2 percent of the latter decade's output far exceeded the equivalent top percent of the fifties, and in this decade Bryant's story might have been the best.
4) "The Terminal Beach," by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds, 1965). Rejected by every American market of its time as eventless, internalized, and depressing, this mysterious and beautiful work was the key story of its decade, the pivot for science fiction; its importance lay not only in its depiction of "inner space," the complex and tormented vistas of the human spirit in the post-technological age, but in its use of science fiction technique to convert its ambiguous landscape, and by implication our century, to "science fiction."
5) "Private Eye," by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding Science Fiction, 1949). A puzzle story, a futuristic mystery (how can the protagonist make a premeditated murder look accidental when the forensic pathologists and the prosecution have time-scanning devices that can follow him from birth and put him on stage all the time?) that in its horrid denouement indicates exactly where the Kuttners thought the paraphernalia and technological wonders of the future would take us and why; cleanly written, paced to within an inch of its life, and although still anthologized, it is nonetheless always underrated as the masterpiece that it is.
