Today is October 24, the birthday of Mark Clifton (1906-1963). Clifton was a well-regarded science fiction writer in fifties and early sixties. He has fallen into obscurity today. He is best remembered as the author of They’d Rather Be Right, the most obscure Hugo Award winner.

But he also wrote some short fiction that was included in several year’s best anthologies. For this post, I read “Clerical Error”. It was first pusblished in the February 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

It was reprinted in Isaac Aximov Presents the Great SF Stories 18, which covered 1956. That was where I first read this story years ago.

I didn’t remember anything about it.

The story concerns a psyschiatrist, Dr. Kinstong, working on a government base in what was then the near future. Thsi was written duriing the Cold War, and the future is a , well, not really a police state, but there are loyalty boards that make sure everyone is loyal to the government.

There is no fancy technology in this story, unlike most of the stories John W. Campbell published.

KIingston doesn’t want to approval a lobotomy on a scientist who is in the high security ward. Kingston dowsn’t have clearance to see the patient himself due to not having his security clearance yet. He’s new on the job.

So in order to find out what is really wrong with the patient, he makes a clerical error and gets himself committed and put in the same cell as the patient.

In his introduction to the story, Asimov said the ending was weak. I have to agree. I think this story was included because of some of the arguments about psychiatry and the government at the time.

This wasn’t an excitiing story. I’ve read several of Clifton’s other short stories in this Great SF series. That was long ago. I don’t recall them. I’ll probably reread them at some point. Clifton is hhighly regarded among historians of the field.