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Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews
For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Look at the Evidence 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 1987 and 1992.
- GenresNonfictionEssays
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
John Clute
58 books42 followersJohn 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.
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.
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August 12, 2025
In scope this book covers the years 1987-92, which means books covered include such as John Crowley’s Aegypt, Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, three Iain M Banks ‘Culture’ novels and a collection, five by Jonathan Carroll, The Fetch and Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, The Wild Shore and Red Mars. It is thus a fearsome assembly of authors and titles, and often an equally ferocious dissection; for reviewing carries two functions: to serve as an advertisement of some kind for new books - a sort of news service; and to allow deeper description and an attempt to interpret - one mind (the reviewer’s) pitted against another’s (the author’s). This second function does not require that the reader of the review not have read the book under review; in fact it may be better if the review is read after reading the book it talks about.
How can one review a book of reviews? Not only that, but when the reviewer under review is one whose language is so idiosyncratic as to very often take centre stage instead of the subject of his scrutiny? Clute’s language, especially in the reviews written for Interzone, delights in neologism and the play of sound and word; he claims that he is only using ‘the right word at the right time’ but it can be vexing, exhilarating, or downright bloody annoying. Now, your reviewer is not going to feign a cloth ear and claim that everything can be said with a vocabulary of two hundred words; if there are not words for some things then it is the writer’s job to make sure there are. Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty said that when he used a word, it meant what he wanted it to mean; to which Alice asked if you could make words mean so many things. And the reply Alice got to that is in the front of practically every book on linguistics: "The question is, which is to be master, that’s all." Take in the lot of it and invest in a good dictionary, that’s the way. Clute insists that every word counts, and as such the words should reward effort, and persistence. The trouble with it is, very often, that if he uses a word frequently (‘theodicy’, for example), he will - we notice by having read through the assembled Evidence - have defined it once, and then not again; which is valid in the context of a collection but not in that of a review read out of conjunction with others. ‘Abyssal chthonic resonator’, though? What that? He not only do the police in different voices, he do the voices in different voices too. If every word is to count, the reader may be heard to say, should every word not be comprehensible to the reader?
There are common themes here, and one of them is an increasing concern with environmental destruction, with ‘humankind palping the flensed breasts of the Earth’ and with a vision of a ‘Factory-farm solitude’ of modern Britain. Timely enough, yes, and a lot of modern SF has that underlying theme, that of John Varley’s ‘Steel Beach’ where living a natural life is no longer possible because the environment around us has become unnatural. But to assume a literature which by its nature is fabulation has to be seen in this light, is surely to mistake the imaginative for the naturalistic. To quote Australian author Margaret Barbalet, in her novel Steel Beach (not related to the Varley), "we shouldn’t trust novels to tell us history. We long for a glimpse of the real texture of the past. Novels are woven full of holes."
No matter how we may jump to conclusions: like the identification of Dracula with Mrs Thatcher in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, a conclusion Clute seizes on in the curiously named ‘Bat Snatcher and the Porcine Undeads’ (he does a lot of this), maybe the conclusion isn’t the only one of the book in question, and we are guilty of inductive thought: making the part stand for the whole. This kind of thing may not show up in reviews of two or three books taken at a time in Interzone or the Washington Post but after a while you begin to see that the same conclusions are going to come up time after time. ‘Agenda SF’, like Steel Beach and Robinson’s Red Mars, begins to look a likely stance to take, and an important one, and one which will not be let go in the pieces assembled here. A lot of it is baroquely humourous, though; for example describing the Docklands site of the 1995 Eastercon as ‘a Monty Python pop-up of the inside of Mark Thatcher’s skull’. His knowledge of the genre is after all encyclopaedic; and as well as the review columns there are the round-ups of the years’ SF, first of all from the Orbit SF Yearbook until it is dispatched without a Trial, and then from New Worlds and the Nebula Awards, and these round-ups are wise with thirty years’ observation and a keen indepth understanding of the genre that we call home.
What is the nature of the observation? Close. To take an example, this reviewer picked a review of a book he read recently: Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson (Futura, 1989). The back cover blurbs for Tours more or less say ‘this novel avoids being pretentious by just so much’. I found Tours lyrically written but baffling, the more so as I’d decided that the mysterious woman character who links the stories together and inadvertently changes twentieth-century history was never anything but illusory. Clute describes Erickson’s novels as ‘Fantasy if America is; like strobe shots of a disaster, [*Tours*] afforded no full views of the land of dreams, only gasped recollections of nightmare’. He goes on to say: ‘Dominating the book, Banning Jainlight and his pornography too easily embody a rhetoric of self-disgust and horror, a rhetoric which comes all close to a kind of surrealistic chat about the unspeakable. The fragments which frame this story refract its central erotic obsessions, weltschmerz, lust for meaning, violence.’
That, to me, is clear; and I find no reason to disagree with it. ‘The littoral contortuplications of the central image or model of the broken boundless river convey a spread of meaning too broad to clutch the heart, too shallow to drown in.’ Littoral contortuplications? But you know what he means; it’s as though we had the meaning of meaning without needing the meaning itself. And I found myself grinning unsagely at the line ‘a plethora of rogue symbols gnaws constantly at one’s keel.’ Well, yes. There’s an image in the novel where an elderly boatman inconveniently dies, and his successor, unable to find anywhere to bury the old gent, ties him to the keel of the boat, and - of course - is constantly aware afterwards of riding the boat constantly over bones. One does not need to have read the novel and remember that image to see what Clute is driving at by borrowing the image for the review; in the case of a review that is more than just a ‘buy this; don’t buy that’, the text of the novel and the text of its review can in some way dovetail, the one illuminating the other.
Which is the point. It is no Bible but a series of signposts. It’s evidence.
How can one review a book of reviews? Not only that, but when the reviewer under review is one whose language is so idiosyncratic as to very often take centre stage instead of the subject of his scrutiny? Clute’s language, especially in the reviews written for Interzone, delights in neologism and the play of sound and word; he claims that he is only using ‘the right word at the right time’ but it can be vexing, exhilarating, or downright bloody annoying. Now, your reviewer is not going to feign a cloth ear and claim that everything can be said with a vocabulary of two hundred words; if there are not words for some things then it is the writer’s job to make sure there are. Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty said that when he used a word, it meant what he wanted it to mean; to which Alice asked if you could make words mean so many things. And the reply Alice got to that is in the front of practically every book on linguistics: "The question is, which is to be master, that’s all." Take in the lot of it and invest in a good dictionary, that’s the way. Clute insists that every word counts, and as such the words should reward effort, and persistence. The trouble with it is, very often, that if he uses a word frequently (‘theodicy’, for example), he will - we notice by having read through the assembled Evidence - have defined it once, and then not again; which is valid in the context of a collection but not in that of a review read out of conjunction with others. ‘Abyssal chthonic resonator’, though? What that? He not only do the police in different voices, he do the voices in different voices too. If every word is to count, the reader may be heard to say, should every word not be comprehensible to the reader?
There are common themes here, and one of them is an increasing concern with environmental destruction, with ‘humankind palping the flensed breasts of the Earth’ and with a vision of a ‘Factory-farm solitude’ of modern Britain. Timely enough, yes, and a lot of modern SF has that underlying theme, that of John Varley’s ‘Steel Beach’ where living a natural life is no longer possible because the environment around us has become unnatural. But to assume a literature which by its nature is fabulation has to be seen in this light, is surely to mistake the imaginative for the naturalistic. To quote Australian author Margaret Barbalet, in her novel Steel Beach (not related to the Varley), "we shouldn’t trust novels to tell us history. We long for a glimpse of the real texture of the past. Novels are woven full of holes."
No matter how we may jump to conclusions: like the identification of Dracula with Mrs Thatcher in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, a conclusion Clute seizes on in the curiously named ‘Bat Snatcher and the Porcine Undeads’ (he does a lot of this), maybe the conclusion isn’t the only one of the book in question, and we are guilty of inductive thought: making the part stand for the whole. This kind of thing may not show up in reviews of two or three books taken at a time in Interzone or the Washington Post but after a while you begin to see that the same conclusions are going to come up time after time. ‘Agenda SF’, like Steel Beach and Robinson’s Red Mars, begins to look a likely stance to take, and an important one, and one which will not be let go in the pieces assembled here. A lot of it is baroquely humourous, though; for example describing the Docklands site of the 1995 Eastercon as ‘a Monty Python pop-up of the inside of Mark Thatcher’s skull’. His knowledge of the genre is after all encyclopaedic; and as well as the review columns there are the round-ups of the years’ SF, first of all from the Orbit SF Yearbook until it is dispatched without a Trial, and then from New Worlds and the Nebula Awards, and these round-ups are wise with thirty years’ observation and a keen indepth understanding of the genre that we call home.
What is the nature of the observation? Close. To take an example, this reviewer picked a review of a book he read recently: Tours of the Black Clock by Steve Erickson (Futura, 1989). The back cover blurbs for Tours more or less say ‘this novel avoids being pretentious by just so much’. I found Tours lyrically written but baffling, the more so as I’d decided that the mysterious woman character who links the stories together and inadvertently changes twentieth-century history was never anything but illusory. Clute describes Erickson’s novels as ‘Fantasy if America is; like strobe shots of a disaster, [*Tours*] afforded no full views of the land of dreams, only gasped recollections of nightmare’. He goes on to say: ‘Dominating the book, Banning Jainlight and his pornography too easily embody a rhetoric of self-disgust and horror, a rhetoric which comes all close to a kind of surrealistic chat about the unspeakable. The fragments which frame this story refract its central erotic obsessions, weltschmerz, lust for meaning, violence.’
That, to me, is clear; and I find no reason to disagree with it. ‘The littoral contortuplications of the central image or model of the broken boundless river convey a spread of meaning too broad to clutch the heart, too shallow to drown in.’ Littoral contortuplications? But you know what he means; it’s as though we had the meaning of meaning without needing the meaning itself. And I found myself grinning unsagely at the line ‘a plethora of rogue symbols gnaws constantly at one’s keel.’ Well, yes. There’s an image in the novel where an elderly boatman inconveniently dies, and his successor, unable to find anywhere to bury the old gent, ties him to the keel of the boat, and - of course - is constantly aware afterwards of riding the boat constantly over bones. One does not need to have read the novel and remember that image to see what Clute is driving at by borrowing the image for the review; in the case of a review that is more than just a ‘buy this; don’t buy that’, the text of the novel and the text of its review can in some way dovetail, the one illuminating the other.
Which is the point. It is no Bible but a series of signposts. It’s evidence.
Displaying 1 of 1 review