orn in Canada in 1940 and resident in Britain since 1969, John Clute has been one of the SF field's leading critics and commentators for almost four decades. Blessed with a deeply resonant prose style, copious cultural knowledge and acute literary insight, Clute has penetratingly illuminated (and at times demolished) innumerable works of speculative fiction in his reviews for such publications as Interzone, Foundation, The Washington Post's Book World, The New York Review of Science Fiction and Science Fiction Weekly. Many of these critiques and essays have been collected in three major non-fiction collections, Strokes (1988), Look at the Evidence (1996) and, recently, Scores (2003), issued by Beccon Publications.
His invaluable contributions to professional and public understanding of SF and fantasy found summary in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) and in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), both of which he co-edited and many of whose entries he compiled personally; a briefer, but highly idiosyncratic and lively, reference volume is Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995), written by Clute alone.
John Clute's career as an author of fiction has been subordinated to his activities as a critic and encyclopedist; occasional short stories and one novel, The Disinheriting Party (1977), constituted his total output in the creative sphere until quite recently. But a major SF novel, Appleseed, appeared from Tor in 2001, and a sequel is promised.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed John Clute by e-mail in July and August of 2004.
You've now been a freelance writer—book reviewer, essayist, encyclopedist and, occasionally, novelist—for around 40 years: a career of extraordinary distinction. What are the chief rewards of the freelance literary critic's life, and the pitfalls (if any)?
Clute: The worst pitfall, I like to think, is guilt—a solid gold, mother's-milk, introjected, Protestant anguish about the relationship of the worldly soul and Duty, Duty being understood here as honest Work, like what my parents gave their lives to. But I know this is codswallop. The worst pitfall of being freelance is shame. Even now that I'm old enough to have already retired from a real job, I find myself waking up some mornings with the most appalling sense that I've been Named and Shamed at last, stark naked in the Mall where honest people spend honest wages. That the bank, the parents, the friends, the lovers, the colleagues have all suddenly realized that you've been cheating them all these years. And suddenly, just like being naked, your wallet is entirely empty.
Which brings up the other pitfall, the obvious one: That there is no salary. You could really be naked.
And you have no excuse.
On the other hand, I suppose the heart of what is good about being a freelance is so evident to any freelance that it is hard to remember that others don't share the privilege: The privilege of living your own life.
That you can remember your life unbroken.
That you can walk into the street as a child does (though creakier), as though the world lies before you (though dimmer). Being a freelance, when the juices are flowing and the panic (see above) has been leashed for a bit, is like a daily moult.
More practically, you are able to say yes to new work.
You're unusually well placed to consider English-language SF as a cultural phenomenon, being Canadian-born, a long-time U.K. resident and a frequent visitor to the United States. Very broadly, what are the major differences between British, Canadian and American SF, and do you feel especially at home with any particular national variant on the genre?
Clute: Difference? I give you difference. Every which way and Sunday. Crossways across cultures, up and down through time, diagonally. Depending, of course, on your definition of SF, and where you are looking from.
In 1950, when I started to read SF, it was all one thing for an American or a Canadian, and very home-like; but if I'd started in the U.K., it would have either been dejected fragments of the Scientific Romance tradition, or imports. Between 1980 and maybe 1995 or so, I figure it all comes sort of together for a bit: I think a lot of readers sensed that American SF (which is what Damon Knight pointed at when he said SF was what he pointed at) was a First World literature for the guys who'd won the century, penetrated the frontier, etc; that Canadian SF (this is my own formulation, but I think it's not eccentric) was an SF of transcendence, that for Canadian SF writers like A.E. van Vogt the only way to get to the magic future was to become Superman and to leap there at a single bound; and that British SF had become an Island Genre, a set of stories about the encroaching sea/Yanks/viruses/totalitarians/aliens, against which simple folk like you and me were essentially helpless.
And now, in 2004, Brit SF is edgy and exuberant and street-wise and shrugs its shoulders, and Canadian SF is beginning to think that Canada may be a polder, not a wilderness, and American SF holds to anything it can hold to as the ground beneath it swells into more and more intolerable manifestations of Empire and the soul shivers but stays very silent. There is a lot of holding on to what we've got in 2004. Hey, surprise. The Romans hoarded lead.
Readers of Science Fiction Weekly are very familiar with your book reviews, as featured in your regular "Excessive Candour" column. How do you select which books to review? And what determines your critical approach to a given title?
Clute: It's not quite random, but it's getting there. The initial principle, which after 95 columns has necessarily faded away, was never to review the same author twice; was to construct in this fashion a wide-spectrum fully archived gaze upon the field. In various ways, I still try for that, I still try to review texts that may broaden my sense of the field (and consequently may broaden my readers' sense as well).
Two things affect my conscious approach to a title: 1) if that title has an historical relationship to the field—either (like Robida's Twentieth Century) because it helped form the field or (like Heinlein's For Us, the Living) because the only way to understand it is to put it into context—then I like to treat my readers as fellow spelunkers doing braille on the past; 2) for any title at all, at the same time, the essential critical approach is to be prepared to be surprised. Surprised at the new. Surprised that something marketed as new isn't new at all. Surprised at the dangerousness of reading something nobody has read before, and coming back with it between your teeth and saying it down.
Of course, the very term "Excessive Candour" testifies to your philosophy of reviewing. Why your emphasis on "candour"? Is outspoken honesty difficult for reviewers in the SF field, and outside it, for that matter?
Clute: The phrase comes from a batch of paragraphs and short essays I wrote quite a few years ago in which I argued that, because everybody knew everybody in a field which claimed to try to tell the truth about the world, being "kind" to people we knew, as reviewers, was intensely damaging. It ate away at the very notion of a field that told—that speculated about—the truth. I knew, and know, that telling the truth is very hard to manage. It is very difficult to be honest in print when you know personally the writer you are being honest about. Praise (which is also part of candour) cloys in the throat; dispraise feels like treachery.
But you gotta do it. If you don't, you're nothing but cholesterol. So there's no choice, really.
So I said then. Since 9/11, the need for candour is redoubled.
It wasn't my idea, by the way, to call my column "Excessive Candour." I think [SCIFI.com's General Manager] Craig Engler must have asked me for a name, and I think I must have omitted to answer; so I think he (or whoever he asked to take up my slack) came up with this.
Your style as a reviewer is highly distinctive: penetrating and poetic. How did you develop your style? And how widely do you vary it, between writing a popular review column and (say) drafting a reference article?
Clute: I do really think of my "style"—I am conscious that I do push the envelope a bit at times—as a kind of Body English. I think I always try to shape the sentence around the thing described, to do a highly verbed Body English mime of that which I'm describing. This is, of course, pretty invasive. It is highly invasive to try to put the heart of somebody's else work into your own words. Because it's not paraphrase I do—paraphrase is just clothing, no author need be afraid of paraphrase, even though bad paraphrases are insulting. But what I try to do is get the inner hook of anything I'm reading, which is to say that what I try to do is steal its soul.
There is of course the question of language, vocabulary. I do get complaints from people about my use of words they don't know. Quite often, these complaints have an ad hominem ring to them: You only use a word I don't know because you yourself want to prove something to me, you want to humiliate me, you want to shame me in front of my children. I bet you don't know what that word means anyway.
I plead innocent, of course. And I think, more often than not, I am innocent. I do think my mind does something different with words than most writers. I think I probably have a greater access to my recognition vocabulary than some writers, and/or a diminished feel for the difference between a word at the heart of most working vocabularies and a word right at the edge of anybody's normal recognition range. I think my use of vocabulary is, therefore, a bit unsocialized; a bit autodidactic. A bit Tourette ...
A reference article, no matter how far afield it may seem to go, always starts in the default of fact. Writing entries in encyclopedias is, actually, a rather difficult thing to do—until you get the hang of it, until you get that feeling of freedom that comes from strict obedience to rules. Some writers—sometimes those who actually know most about a particular subject—never get the hang of doing an entry on that subject. It is (unkindly though this may seem) as though they think that the fact/default level of entry writing is something the servants can deal with afterwards ("You say there are some wrong dates in my entry," I remember one fine essayist responding to me about an entry he was giving me for some book. "Never mind, they can take of it later." "But," I said, "there is no They. They is us," sort of thing.) The servant in reference work writing is the author.
Your latest collection of reviews, Scores, covers the last decade in SF and fantasy with magisterial intensity, engaging in deep interpretation of individual books and in stimulating identification of broader trends in the speculative genres. Does Scores have a uniting thesis, a conclusion as to what SF basically is in the Millennial period, what it is becoming?
Clute: Not quite. Scores is 125 reviews in search of an Answer. I think the Answer may be that the literatures of the fantastic, having served as dreams of the World for the past two centuries, as the dreams of alarm that the canary might have dreamed just before the gas got fatal, may have reached the end of the trail. The writers of works in these genres have generated over that period a series of Body-English read-outs of the feel of the world as it convulsed onwards, and we have all benefited from these dreams of the shape of things. (I think Chris Priest defines a "prestige"—in his novel of that name—as a kind of residue left after an act of magic, an abandoned hunk of flesh, a hat, a scarf waving goodbye to a transubstantiated virgin. In this sense of the word, I think each work of the fantastic can be understood as a prestige.) But the time has passed for stories, maybe. Maybe (I always quote Dylan when I get aroused) "this ain't a dream no more, it's the real thing."
One of the paradoxes of prose SF in the current decade is that prophecies of its impending demise have been uttered for many years, and yet the quality of writing in the genre may never have been higher: In purely literary terms, SF seems healthy. Yet given market conditions and general socio-cultural trends, is this a paradox at all?
Clute: We have to keep something clear here. A prophecy of demise need not be a declaration of a failure of quality. I do think (see previous answer) that SF, that indeed all the literatures of the fantastic, may be approaching an historical terminus, a point at which (perhaps) the world itself will have become all the worlds we dreamed it might become, one great charnel heap where everything happens too often and too soon, a kind of antechamber to the Singularity. But I also think that the best SF ever written is being written right now, at the brink of these things. Take a musical example (one I offered long ago, in an early appreciation of Gene Wolfe, a writer—by the way—who could not have flourished in the youth of any genre, much less SF): the example being Johann Sebastian Bach, who may be the greatest composer who ever lived, and who synthesized and summed up and wrote the greatest masterpieces of Baroque music at a time when Baroque as a form was moribund. It is a Whig convention of the latter years of our dear old Western Civilization that anything that is New is an advance on the Old, that the Old was never anything more than half-real, that it was an imago of the Real, which is us, that all historical change is a form of Progress ("You can't stop progress"). According to this frame of thinking, Bach is not only obsolete—but, because he failed to embrace the Gallant Ditties of the next generation, he made a fatal Historical Error. Bach is less real than Mozart because he doesn't sound as much like us.
All of which is a snare and a delusion and crap. It is a snare SF people are particularly prone to, because SF is a genre (like, really, all the genres of the fantastic) tied to an unprecedented degree to the passage of time in the world. So it is natural for us to think that old SF visions are not simply outmoded but wrong, not simply wrong but less real. What I do very seriously think, in contrast to this, is that SF visions laid down today may gain some of their greatness through a sense of completion and valediction. That they say the world they come from. Stuck out here on the last limb of a dead-end tree, they are writing the fugues and cantatas of a Bach.
Getting on to more specific issues: although your reviews can be very cutting when necessary, you don't stint on praise either. Perhaps it's difficult to be so precise, but can you identify the 10 or so contemporary SF and fantasy writers you consider most significant, most essential to the continuing (if terminal) excellence of fantastic fiction?
Clute: A hard deadly invidious impossible question, of course. Again, I do think that we are in a crux world here, and it may well be in this turmoil that the best writers are not the writers most significantly involved in the continuance of the fantastic. I don't really feel that the best writers I know—John Crowley, Tom Disch, Ursula Le Guin (now that she has given up doing fake Mother stuff and has gone Crone like some hypnopomp looming up out of our best dreams), Michael Swanwick, Gene Wolfe—have necessarily much to say about continuance. Of much newer writers, someone like Kelly Link is a beacon or a tocsin, or both; Charles Stross is a jumping bean, who knows what will sprout out of the guy, or if it will take root; Steph Swainston will have to write another book; China Miéville will have to write a slower one; K.J. Bishop will have to make up a very different city; and so on. Of the writers in the middle of their careers, from Elizabeth Hand (one of the benefits of "Excessive Candour" is also to say a positive true thing, and thus to be able to name her) to Michael Swanwick, from Mike Harrison (who is younger than he thinks he is) to Greg Egan, and from A to Z, it is not easy to say a thing. Because the middle of what we are in the middle of is what they are stirring.
What's your estimation of the New Weird, the strong upsurge of radical urban fantasy led by China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and others? Is the New Weird truly something new, or instead, as Graham Joyce has recently argued, simply more of a long-running brand of "Old Peculiar"?
Clute: I'd prefer to think of the New Weird, which is not a term or a movement I've had the slightest connection with, as a continuing contribution, from writers of fantasy and dark fantasy, to an essential enterprise of 20th-century fantasy, which is basically to achieve a subversive take on the episteme. Sorry, try that in English: The job of fantasy is to say No in Thunder to the wrongness of the world by seeing it. It is what Tolkien began to do in the trenches, and though it must be said that The Lord of the Rings has traveled a far piece from Recognition, it does still darkly resonate with No. What the "New Weird" seems to do best is recognize the urban. New Weird writers are almost always writers of Urban Fantasy: hence the costumings, the dreck, the edificial cities, the scientism of decadence, the sh-t-smeared mages, etc, etc. What I like less is the touristical gauding and gauching over all these splendors and miseries. It's noisy, it generates a lot of superficial splatter, and it also fogs the lenses; and what I'm afraid I may be detecting is a kind of descent into a new-old trap, and what we'll end up with will be a set of Adults-Only Dying-Earth fantasylands scummy with nostalgia.
In the last 15 years or so, Alternate History Fiction has become notably popular, and the quantity of it published has gone from a thin stream to a thunderous onrush. Why, in your view, has this happened? Is alternate history truly SF, or something quite other?
Clute: Put Howard Waldrop and Kim Newman, and a couple of others, to one side; because their story ideas, which are like magnetic poles for melancholia, do I think reflect something of the world-mix we have entered. They do seem to understand that to say that history is a pantomime is also to say that, here and now, in the new world, we too are wearing faces. And that to change faces is to repeat the tragedy of birth. That to Alternate is to cry again.
But alternate history as written by some others does seem to me to come out of the same impulses of nostalgia and greed that have turned the whole of the 20th century into a Collectible. Alternate History collects pasts like butterflies, and pins them.
Space opera, of course, is entirely intrinsic to SF, and has, especially in Britain, risen to become the genre's characteristic form. Why should this happen at a time when the realistic prospect of manned space travel has receded so dramatically?
Clute: Because space opera is a playing field. It is an arena co-extensive with vision. It is an opera—as fatuous and as profound as sung opera. Like sung opera, it does not add up: it multiplies. It is a way of putting into comprehensible dramatic storyable form a very great range of hypotheses about the nature of the human condition. It is fun. It is impossible (as you say) which means it is entirely possible to imagine. Only the impossible is easy to make up. It is, in other words, precisely because real space flight has become history that writers of space opera have been freed to go there.
Besides, most writers rarely touch the near future at all. And, as one is sometimes tempted to ask, why should they want to?
What do you make of the tendency of some major SF authors—notably Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Paul McAuley—to move quite consciously away from SF, into historical novels, thrillers, even the dreaded mainstream realist novel? Is this inevitable, and is there a strong sense in which these writers' books remain SF despite their apparent shift?
Clute: SF writers have always been capable of moving into other genres (including the airless chamber of the mimetic), but you're right, there is a noticeable tendency in recent years for SF (and fantasy, and horror) writers to shift away from overt SF, by which I mean SF which it is impossible to market as something else. Shouldn't be too cynical here, as it must absolutely certainly be the case (right?) that the only reason a writer will shift away from a stigma-ridden genre like SF to some more sales-friendly market is to tell the world better. Of the writers you mention, I think this can be presumed to be the case, though variously. For a long time now, Bill Gibson has been trying to apply SF "modulars" to an increasingly intimate description of the SF world we live in; which can also be said of Bruce Sterling. Neal Stephenson got, I think, trapped in a particularly haunting cusp of the past transmogrifying into now. Pray for light. Greg Bear did do a thriller or two, which forced him to eschew some use of his relentless mind. Paul McAuley skips and jumps; but White Devils is pure SF by the end.
Every now and again, you'll review a so-called mainstream literary novel that resembles SF—for example, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, not long ago on Science Fiction Weekly. How much first-rate SF does the genre SF audience miss because it's on the other side of the mainstream/genre marketing divide?
Clute: Don't forget I started doing all this stuff a long time ago, when we really did inhabit a ghetto or Keep. In 1975, when we started researching the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and decided we needed to help knock down the ghetto walls, we worked on the knowingly iconoclastic premise that anything describable as SF was indeed SF. It didn't have to look like Damon Knight. Anything set in an arguable future was SF; anything that made any novum even remotely storyable was SF. In operating this way, of course, we found SF all over the place. And we put every author of an SF book into the encyclopedia, without apology. We did not say they were SF writers, we said they wrote an SF book. Let the sh-t fall ... Some of that faux-naive "simplicity" of approach still subtends the occasional choice I make of a book to review. David Mitchell may be marketed as a mainstream writer, but everything he's done so far lies deep within the literatures of the fantastic. He belongs within the natural remit of a reviewer like me.
Over and above all that (this may sound pompous, but hey, let it), I am very little inclined to shape my reviewing choices around marketing decisions made by publishers. It is a trahison des clercs to listen to them.
Other than further excellent book reviews, what can we expect from you in the near future? There's been mention of a new reference work, an essay collection, and of course the sequel to your SF novel Appleseed ...
Clute: I'm working on An Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature for Scarecrow, and we're about to sign a contract for a third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which will go online. This will take at least two years to put together, so I'll wait till closer to release time, I think, to talk much about it. I'm thinking about a collection of essays, to be called either The Darkening Garden or Pardon This Intrusion. Or both, as there is quite a bit of stuff to put together, and it all may
make two books. I love the first title because it describes the fantastic to a T for me; and I love the second title because "Pardon this intrusion" are the first words Frankenstein's "monster" speaks in Frankenstein (1818). Which is perfect, of course: because "Pardon this intrusion" is what the fantastic has always said to a world which does not wish to recognize itself in the mirror.
A sequel to Appleseed is on hold until I grasp the right story to tell it (I think I may be close). It will be set 3,000 years before Appleseed, and will Reveal All.
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Also in this issue:
The cast and crew of Shaun of the Dead
and
The cast and crew of Smallville
