John Clute

John Clute
BornJohn Frederick Clute
(1940-09-12) 12 September 1940 (age 83)
Canada
OccupationAuthor, critic, writer
LanguageEnglish
GenreNon-fiction, novels

John Frederick Clute (born 12 September 1940)[1] 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"[2] and "perhaps the foremost reader-critic of science fiction in our time, and one of the best the genre has ever known."[3] He was one of eight people who founded the English magazine Interzone in 1982[2] (the others included Malcolm Edwards, Colin Greenland, Roz Kaveney, and David Pringle).

Clute's articles on speculative fiction have appeared in various publications since the 1960s. 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 author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, all of which won Hugo Awards for Best Related Work (a category for nonfiction). He earned the Pilgrim Award, bestowed by the Science Fiction Research Association for Lifetime Achievement in the field of science fiction scholarship, in 1994. Clute is also author of the collections of reviews and essays Strokes; Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews; Scores; Canary Fever; and Pardon This Intrusion. His 2001 novel Appleseed, a space opera, was noted for its "combination of ideational fecundity and combustible language"[4] and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book for 2002.[5]

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 Encyclopedia's 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).[6] 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.

  1. ^ John Clute at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  2. ^ a b Davis, Matthew John Clute: Yakfests of the Empyrean Archived 21 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine, Strange Horizons, 18 September 2006.
  3. ^ Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan (March 1997). "The Critic". Science Fiction Studies. 24 (71). Greencastle, IN: DePauw University: 139–149. ISSN 0091-7729.
  4. ^ Di Filippo, Paul (18 June 2001). "Appleseed: SF's premier critic stands on the shoulders of Cordwainer Smith and A.E. van Vogt to explore a new universe". SciFi.com. Archived from the original on 25 March 2009. Retrieved 28 August 2013.
  5. ^ "Notable Books", The New York Times, 3 December 2002]
  6. ^ Langford, David (24 March 2017). "Statistics". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Archived from the original on 1 February 2021. Retrieved 3 April 2017.

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