John Frederick Clute (born 12 September 1940) is a Canadian-born author and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy literature who has lived in both England and the United States since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history" and "perhaps the foremost reader-critic of science fiction in our time, and one of the best the genre has ever known." He was one of eight people who founded the English magazine Interzone in 1982 and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

In 2006, Clute published the essay collection The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror. The third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with David Langford and Peter Nicholls) was released online as a beta text in October 2011 and has since been greatly expanded; it won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2012. The Encyclopedias statistics page reported that, as of 24 March 2017, Clute had authored the great majority of articles: 6,421 solo and 1,219 in collaboration, totalling over 2,408,000 words (more than double, in all cases, those of the second-most prolific contributor, David Langford). The majority of these are Author entries, but there are also some Media entries, notably that for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.

Clute was a Guest of Honour at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, from 14 to 18 August 2014.

Personal life

Raised in Canada, Clute lived in the United States from 1956 until 1964. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at New York University in 1962 while living with writer and artist Pamela Zoline.

Clute married artist Judith Clute in 1964. He has been the partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996.

Career

Clute's first professional publication was a long science-fictional poem entitled "Carcajou Lament", which appeared in TriQuarterly in 1959. His first short story (one of his few) was "A Man Must Die", which appeared in New Worlds in 1966.

In 1960, he served as Associate Editor of Collage, a Chicago-based "slick" magazine which ran only two issues; it published early work by Harlan Ellison and R. A. Lafferty. During the 1960s and 70s he appeared chiefly in NEW WORLDS, becoming an important contributor of essays and reviews.

In 1977, Clute published his first novel, The Disinheriting Party (Allison & Busby). Reviewer Hilary Bailey wrote that this "everyday story of family life in a revenge tragedy, of relations and revelations, hidden identities and loss of identity, incest and inheritance, all brooded over by the Father Who Will Not Die, carries itself forward swiftly and surely to its conclusion with strength and control."

Clute's second novel, Appleseed (2001), is the story of trader Nathanael Freer, who pilots an AI-helmed starship named Tile Dance en route to the planet Eolhxir to deliver a shipment of nanotechnological devices. Freer meets a man calling himself Johnny Appleseed, who rejoins Freer with his lost lover, Ferocity Monthly-Niece. Meanwhile, a terrifying, data-destroying "plaque" is threatening the galaxy's civilizations. Clute has proposed it as the first novel in a trilogy. Science fiction and fantasy author Paul Di Filippo called it "a space opera for the 21st century."

Reviewing

Clute's first significant science fiction reviews appeared in the late 1960s in New Worlds. "Prometheus Emphysema", "An empty bottle. An empty mind. An empty book", "Book of the Mouth", and "Mage Sh*t".

Excessive candour

Clute has issued a polemic he calls the "Protocol of Excessive Candour", which argues that reviewers of science fiction and fantasy must not pull punches because of friendship:

His review column of this name began at Science Fiction Weekly and moved to Sci-Fi Wire.

Writing style

Contributing the essay on himself for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Clute wrote that his "criticism, despite some curiously flamboyant obscurities, remains essentially practical; it has appeared mostly in the form of reviews, some of considerable length." He told an interviewer,

Matthew Davis has written, "Clute stands out, not just because of the depth and breadth of his knowledge, but also for the individuality of his writing; even the most formal sentence plucked from one of his scholastic works is readily identifiable due to his individual judgement and style."

Author Henry Wessells, in a review of The Darkening Garden, wrote:

Critical reception

Hilary Bailey, reviewing The Disinheriting Party, wrote,

Keith Brooke wrote, "This is not an over-written novel, it's an intensely-written one. At its best it's a fantastically effective technique: a spangly word-portrait that has a real sense of wonder bursting off every page. At its worst, it gets in the way, blinding the reader to Clute's wildly detailed imaginings."

Bibliography

Criticism

  • Strokes [1966-1986] (Serconia Press, 1988),
  • Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews [1987-1993] (Serconia Press, 1996) [title page misdated], (hardcover), (paper)
  • Scores [1993–2003] (Beccon Publications, 2003),
  • The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror (Payseur & Schmidt, 2006),
  • Canary Fever (Beccon Publications, 2009),
  • Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Beccon Publications, 2011),
  • Stay (Beccon Publications, 2014),
  • The Book Blinders: Annals of Vandalism at the British Library (Norstrilia Press, 2024),

Fiction

  • The Disinheriting Party (Allison and Busby, 1977),
  • Appleseed (Orbit, 2001),

Anthology

  • Tesseracts 8 with Candas Jane Dorsey (1999)

References

  • The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, third edition
  • John Clute at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
  • John Clute at the Encyclopedia of Fantasy