An ambitious politician uses the occasion of a lost space colony to try to regain control over a free caste of independent scientists. The story of the lost colony has elements of the account of the Garden of Eden in the Bible and of the Land of the Lotus-Eaters incident in The Odyssey.

‘[The scientific administrators] knew that [the attorney-general] wasn’t concerned for those colonists out there; that he was merely using the public furor to advance his own personal power. They knew that the police worked unremittingly, unceasingly, always and ever to bring every phase of human activity under their control. They knew it was a centuries-old tactic to wait for the right situation to arise, so that lawmakers could be stampeded into passing some law which seemed to apply to this given condition but in actuality broadened police powers over a wide area of man’s actions.

A book about human nature and the psychology of crowds, and a defense of autonomy and independent thinking. In a case of mistaken identity, the wrong man gets drafted out of private industry and assigned to a Pentagon bureau on the psychology of extraterrestrials. The first third of the book is a brilliant satire on government bureaucracy. The latter two-thirds is on the response of people to the extraterrestrials when they do come. Clifton is now a forgotten figure, but he won the Hugo award for the best SF novel of 1955. In 1980, Barry N. Malzberg called him "one of the twele most influential writers of science fiction during its fifty-four year commercial publishing history".

A utopian novel in reaction to the egalitarianism of the post-World War II Labour government of Britain. In a post-thermonuclear war society of the future, no one has a right to do or have anything that is contrary to others. The state assigns all positions to citizens according to their appearance. State-sponsored operations alter the features of the beautiful and the ugly alike in order to reduce feelings of envy. It is extensively discussed by Helmut Schoeck in his book Envy (1969). Schoeck writes, “This is perhaps the only novel in the whole of literature to investigate and criticize explicitly, page by page, without circumlocution, the role of envy and the problems of a society that seeks to obviate it.”

A troupe of circus performers is shipwrecked on a barely habitable planet. Their descendants retain the folkways and mores of the circus life. They interact on the basis of something rather like Guatemalan Indian penny-capitalism and have almost no government institutions. Quite imaginative and well written.