Interview

John Clute answers your questions

Name: John Clute
Age: Will turn 56 on Sept. 12
Residence: London, U.K.
Last book read:
Milton in America, by Peter Ackroyd
SF recommendation:
The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

ou could say that John Clute has an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction. He is best-known today as the editor of the Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995), co-editor with Peter Nicholls of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), and editor of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995), which just won a 1996 Hugo Award.

Born in 1940, John Clute makes his home in Britain. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. A selection of his work has been collected in Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986 (Serconia Press). He was one of the founders of the U.K. magazine Interzone, and he also published a non-science fiction novel, The Disinheriting Party, in 1977.

William Gibson has called Clute "formidable" and "an urban literary wit whose grasp of the genre, and of its place in the wider world of letters, are very likely unequaled in our time and language."

Last week Clute sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to answer questions submitted by our readers about his views on science fiction, reading and the next millennium. Here is what he had to say:

Question	How did your interest in science fiction develop?
*--kurt@concentric.net*
Answer	At first, absolutely typical: I read stories I liked (in my case, Nelson S. Bond stories in Bluebook in the 1940s), without necessarily knowing they belonged to a family of stories; then I found an SF magazine (Space Stories, I think, in 1953, which featured Philip K. Dick's "The Variable Man") and found the family. I never became a fan -- i.e. member of an affinity group who knows other fans personally -- because I didn't know fandom existed, and because -- in Toronto, where I then lived -- there wasn't much of an SF community to join, even if I'd been on the search.

Question	What is your definition for fantasy as compared to science fiction?
*--Joe Wheeler, jwheeler@techline.com*
Answer	A very simple distinction is that SF is a set of stories which are arguably possible, in terms of our understanding of science, human history and human nature; and that fantasy is a set of stories which are not arguably possible. Between SF and the world, there is a cognitive continuity; between fantasy and the world, there is not. This is not to say that the sense of Story which lies at the heart of fantasy cannot lead to something we might call Truth. SF takes the shape of the world, upon which it extrapolates. Fantasy (pretentiously, perhaps) takes the shape of the human Story (which one may call the soul), which it tries to recognize. Recognition is, in fact, central to my underlying sense of the structure of fantasy (it's a far better term for what I mean than "knot," the term I used in a Locus interview about the same central movement of the fantasy text). The moment of Recognition is the moment when (for instance) the characters in a fantasy recognize the Story they are in, or the memories they have suppressed, or the true nature of the Land which they must redeem. Recognition looks backward into the underlying truth. In this sense, it is a fairly precise analogue (and contrast) to Conceptual Breakthrough, a phrase Peter Nicholls generated in the 1970s to describe the central movement of the SF text: into a new, larger, better-understood world.

Question	What was the determining cause of what would and would not be included in the encyclopedias?
*--David Burns, dburns@capaccess.org*
Answer	I've been involved in two encyclopedias recently, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls), and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant). We found we could -- at least in theory -- treat SF as a genre whose borders could be defined with some clarity; it was possible, therefore, in the SF encyclopedia, to theoretically include every author who had ever published an SF book in English, and to traverse the genre in theme entries. SF was theoretically coverable in whole (we failed, of course, being human, to cover everything). Fantasy, on the other hand, is very much less defined. Its boundaries are not so much fences as fadings into water margins. Fantasy, instead of being traversed back and forth, needs to be defined as a series of "fuzzy sets" which we try to illuminate as fully as possible through prescriptive examples. So the fantasy encyclopedia, though much much larger than the 1979 edition of the SF one (it's not actually much smaller than the 1993 edition of the SF), is necessarily a very different kind of book -- even though on the surface it looks very similar, because it follows the same setting and and conventions for entry writing and ascription practice, etc.

Question	What importance do you give scientific accuracy -- if not feasibility -- in science fiction?
*--Bob Volk, volkr@syr.lmco.com*
Answer	See answer 2. It is vital to SF that it be based on some possible argument about the nature of the world. I don't think, however, that that argument need necessarily be a very good one; nor do I think that inaccuracies need matter (though sometimes, clearly, they do); nor do I think that SF, despite its name, is even remotely restricted to arguments from science. Its arguments derive also from human history, and our understanding of human nature.

Question	In creating an encyclopedia of science fiction, were you concerned that by describing its borders you might contribute to setting artificial limits to the field?
*--Simon Brown, simonb@ob1.uws.edu.au*
Answer	See answer 3. There is certainly some theoretical risk in defining "all" SF by example, in an alphabetical book. But we were, in fact, not so much concerned with restriction as we were with the fear that readers might object that our remit was impossibly broad, and diffused what sf was to an unacceptable degree. But even broad church is a cookycutter -- it was a Heavy Burden.

Question	Given that the genre spans a wide spectrum of political philosophies, why are so many of the articles in the Encyclopedia slanted to praise the left and denigrate the right?
*--Daren Bush, bushclan@olywa.net*
Answer	The perception that the SFE (convenient shorthand) was biased to the left is, I think, a peculiarly American take. I don't want to be insulting about it, but it does seem to me that the American political spectrum -- in world terms -- is heavily weighted rightwards. As a consequence, utterances which we (Peter Nicholls is Australian; I'm a Canadian who has lived nearly 30 years in the U.K. after 8 years in America) thought were happily middle-of-the-road turn out to have been perceived otherwise in this country. I'd suggest, say, a glance at the entry on Poul Anderson, which I think is both friendly and distinctly not a cooky-cutter view of a writer many might think of as right-wing. On the other hand, convictions are not ever fully disguisable, which is one reason the entries are initialled. I consider myself a centrist with a huge antipathy to authority; in American terms, however, I recognize some of the attitudes I hold, which are ingrained into my whole recognition of the world, could be understood, legitimately enough, as left-oriented. But this is not to admit that I, or others in the project, "denigrate" the right. I don't have a religious or proselytizing sense of politics. Terms like "denigration," I think, apply to a different mindset than that exposed in the broad-church enterprise of the Encyclopedia.

Question	A critic is, obviously, foremost a reader. What type of reader are you? How do you find your reading experience different from other people?
*--Patrick O'Leary, Patri10629@aol.com*
Answer	I think it's a spectrum; and I think that all readers co-create the works they intersect. Reading is a form of creation. Reading as a critic -- for me, at least -- is a heightened form of normal reading, during the process of which I try consciously to co-create, through my own metaphors of understanding, the text being encountered. Because I'm very conscious of this, I think my reviews may in turn have a seductive/invasive timbre which is unusual. But this, again, is a question of degree. What I do as a critic is what I do, more relaxedly, as a reader; and it is what everybody does. Willy nilly, we are all makers.

Question	There is a huge volume of literature present in The Illustrated Encyclopedia. What percentage have you actually read?
*--David Rabuka, dir124@mail.usask.ca*
Answer	There's reading and reading, and reading about. I've been reading constantly in the field for over 40 years, and half the time, with older books, don't quite know whether it's the original reading, or my subsequent reading about the books, that primarily governs any one response or presentation. So. In some sense, I know most of the books in the Illustrated ncyclopedia -- which I like to call the Illustrated Companion, to distinguish it from the other, totally unconnected book. The percentage I've literally read is somewhere, I'd guess, about 40/60 percent. I think...

Question	Why does the Illustrated Encyclopedia so badly shortchange Babylon 5, just tossing it off as a clone of Deep Space Nine?
*--Kate O'Hare, TMSKate@va.pubnix.com*
Answer	Careless viewing and stupidity. If we do a new edition of the book, the section will be rewritten.

Question

Where do you see the genre of science fiction headed toward as we approach the next millennium?

--Matthew Holcomb, holcombm@ocean.com.au

Answer

I've written a lot about this, and don't want to garble through careless repetition what I've tried to suggest. In the book of my reviews and essays Don Keller of Serconia Press published this year (it's called Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews), I suggested in the second piece there that, over the last few decades, SF has begun to lose its profound attachment to the old set of Fables of the First World: Tales whose protagonist, usually human, represents the dominant species in the venue being described, the species which knows how to get to the future.

I think that SF stories today are more and more beginning to sound like Fables of the Third World: Stories whose protagonists, often human, represent cultures which have been colonized by the future. The future may come in the form of aliens, or the catnip nirvana of cyberspace, or as AIs, or as bio-engineered transformations of our own species: but whatever it touches, it subverts. SF stories of this sort can -- depressingly -- read rather like manuals designed to train Polynesians in the art of begging for Cargo; but they can also generate a sense of celebration of the worlds beyond worlds beyond our species' narrow path.

To use another phrase, SF is turning into Exogamy Fables. And let us hope we find some wisdom somewhere. Soon.

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