Eight Keys to Eden
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When Eden, the Earth colony eleven light years away, goes silent and fails to answer any communications from the mother planet, Earth's government goes into a panic. Has something tragic happened on a world already proven to have no intelligent, dangerous lifeforms? Or, are the colonists purposely disregarding the messages for some reason of their own? What could be the real explanation for the mysterious silence of a disciplined, scientific colony?
To learn the answer, Earth's leaders turn to the Extrapolators—the honored group of men and women with an almost superhuman ability to see to the core of any problem. Soon the Extrapolators assign a probationary Extrapolator, Calvin Gray, to the hazardous journey to Eden, where he will win full admission into the ranks to the Extrapolators if he solves whatever problems he finds there.
But, even with his special Extrapolator training, Grey is not prepared for the extent ort nature of the disaster that has struck the colony Eden—thrown back to an almost subhuman state of existence without houses, tools, equipment, or clothing.
"Full of excitement. Richly rewarding. Genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony."—Galaxy magazine
"Clifton was an innovator in the early 1950s and such an impressive innovator that 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."—Barry N. Malzberg, The Science Fiction
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Mark Clifton (1906-1963) was an award-winning American science fiction writer.
He began publishing in May 1952 with the widely anthologized story "What Have I Done?" Most 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 lighter in tone and was mostly written 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 (also known as The Forever Machine), co-written with Riley, which was serialized in Astounding during 1954, and which was awarded the Hugo Award.
Clifton's other most popular short story is "Star Bright," the first of three appearances in Horace Gold's Galaxy (July 1952), about a super-intelligent toddler with psi abilities, which has been compared to Kuttner and Moore's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves."
Clifton as a personnel manager worked for many years and interviewed some 200,000 people, an experience that much formed Clifton's views about people's positive and negative traits and capabilities.
He received the 2010 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award posthumously. He died in 1963.
