Strokes: Essays and Reviews, 1966-1986

by John Clute

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Strokes is a collection of reviews from a wide variety of sources - including Interzone , the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly - about the most significant literatures of the twenty-first science fiction, fantasy and the literatures Clute argues should be recognized as the central modes of fantastika in our times. It covers the period between 1966 and 1986.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

178 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

John Frederick Clute (1940- ) is a Canadian born author and critic who has lived in Britain since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history."

Clute's articles on speculative fiction have appeared in various publications since the 1970s. He is a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls) and of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant), as well as The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction, all of which won Hugo Awards for Best Non-Fiction. Clute is also author of the critical essay collections Strokes, Look at the Evidence, and Scores. His 1999 novel Appleseed, a space opera, was noted for its "combination of ideational fecundity and combustible language" 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.

Reviews

[Marc Aramini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clute's vocabulary and wide reading in the field obviously create a complete and thorough image of SF, but I have always been of the opinion that good criticism explains and makes clear, while art is free to meet its own goals, be they clarity or obfuscation. Clute flirts with pretentiousness and his often acerbic comments, hidden behind an enormous vocabulary, sometimes hide a superficial engagement with the actual books in question. At his worst he summarizes, at his best he places a work in its SF and historical context as few others could. Especially aggravating is the ending section on Wolfe, positing the Autarch as female and mother because of a feminine face on a coin ... How else to describe an androgynous face for a male ruler? Similarly, his insistence that VRT replaces Marsch on page 233 of the original publication of Fifth Head of Cerberus is, alas, also indicative that while his vocabulary and knowledge of SF as a whole are staggering, his critical reading can suffer some shortcomings and be less than holistic.

[Christopher McCaffery]

Occasionally amusing.