Look at the Evidence

by John Clute

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Science Fiction

Synopsis

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 century: science fiction, fantasy and horror: the literatures Clute argues should be recognized as the central modes of fantastika in our times. It covers the period between 1987 and 1992.

Release date: November 24, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

There are a lot of words in this book. I won’t add many more here. Look at the Evidence is divided into three parts. Part One is short. It contains a piece on the nature of sf criticism, and a lecture on the nature of sf. Part One represents the Introduction I might have written had there been no Part One; the lecture in particular, a version of which was delivered in 1994, encapsulates what I think I think. Part Two takes up most of the rest of the book. It is broken into six sections, each of which contains reviews and essays covering a single year, from 1987 to 1992 inclusive, with exceptions. Most of the individual pieces I wrote during those years are reprinted here, with exceptions. Part Three is short. It contains essays on six individual authors. They were written around the same time, with exceptions.

Don Keller of Serconia Press has been calm, and tidal in his insistence that we could still do a book, even though the years continued to pass; and said Oh good, and said No problem, when I finally gave him a manuscript 50,000 words longer than his limit. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.

For a while Don and I thought we might call this book Scores, for the same reason that my earlier book of reviews and essays for Serconia Press was called Strokes: because both terms contain multiple meanings. But we decided not to, somehow. Both books are, all the same, fairly similar in their construction, though the pieces assembled in Look at the Evidence follow chronological order more closely than do those in the earlier volume. As with Strokes, I’ve used original versions for my basic text, rather than edited copy. Some passages have been cleaned up, but no opinion, however stupid, has been edited in hindsight to look wiser. And I’ve inserted within square brackets [like this 1995] some comments, expansions, apologies, hind-sights.

More acknowledgements need to be made. Helen Nicholls read most of these pieces as they were being written, and said Make sense, and said Only connect, and said I guess that’s all right now. The dedication of Look at the Evidence to her is heartfelt. Judith Clute allowed me her cover. This has gone on for many years now. Robin Bloxsidge of Liverpool University Press gave me absolute sanction, in an astonishingly calm voice. David Pringle allowed me to say anything I wanted to say in Interzone. It was a rare thing to do, and an enormously generous thing to do, and I tried to grab the opportunity. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post continued to give me work, and to touch it like a surgeon. David Garnett, who edited the Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook and the New Worlds anthologies before they were shafted, suffered hugely from my modest flirtations with deadlines, but played chicken and won; and James Morrow, who edited the Nebula anthology, also suffered. I edited myself (as Book Reviews Editor) on Foundation, but Edward James did let it go on. Rob Killheffer of Omni taught me how to write for Omni in my own voice: just write a bit better, John, he said. The mafia that run NYRSF were a pushover. I have to thank the various editors of other newspapers and journals for first publishing material which has come home here; these journals are The Correspondent, The Los Angeles Times, The Listener, The Nation, the New Scientist, the New Statesman, The New York Times, The Observer, the SFRA Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Vector. I have also to thank Jim Turner of Arkham House and Eric Lane of Dedalus Books.

The index was composed by Leigh Kennedy, with clarity and grace; and she had to work very fast. Christopher Priest sent it by E-mail to John Berry in Seattle, who designed the book. Micole Sudberg proofread it meticulously. It is now out of our hands.

John CluteLondon     July 1995  

[Here is a declaration of principle for reviewers. I’ve proposed it more than once. I called it the Protocol of Candour on its first appearance in Interzone 24 in 1988 (though I’ve always tended to think of it as the Protocol of Excessive Candour); and when (for a Friends of Foundation Newsletter in 1992) I revised a Readercon 4 piece on my own experience of being criticized, I grafted a modified version of the Protocol into my copy. In every case, I was addressing audiences made of men and women many of whom I quite likely knew personally, and who quite possibly knew me. Hence the interior tone of the thing. But it should be clear enough here in the open air. Here then – spatchcocked from three sources, and tinkered with yet again – is that Protocol, plus some thoughts on being the biter bit 1995.]

Most of us are writers and critics and readers of sf, and as such we inhabit a beehive-dense congregation of affinity groups, by virtue of which it is very difficult for anyone who has been involved in the genre for more than a few years not to have had contact with a significantly high proportion of those who’ve also been active in the field. The benefits of affinity are, in general, obvious enough. But there are reasons to think that this degree of personal contact is not the healthiest thing in the world for sf criticism. The club-like camaraderie of sf unsurprisingly tempts critics and reviewers (in particular) into any number of strategies designed to avoid internal friction: refusing to review books written by friends or acquaintances – which, for anybody who’s been in the field for more than a decade or so, may well mean most of the writers going; muffling negative responses – after one has found oneself forced into a midnight spasm of honesty – in the dawn rewrite; dissimulating archly, in code. The end-result – that the sf beehive buzzes with “friends” who will not review the books of anyone they know, in case they might have to tell the truth – gives sf a sad face.

Reviewers who will not tell the truth are like cholesterol. They are lumps of fat. They starve the heart. I have myself certainly clogged a few arteries, have sometimes kept my mouth shut out of this “friendship” which is nothing in the end but self-interest. So perhaps it is time to call a halt. Perhaps we should establish a Protocol of Excessive Candour, a convention within the community that excesses of intramural harshness are less damaging than the hypocrisies of stroke therapy, that telling the truth is a way of expressing love: self-love; love of others; love for the genre, which claims to tell the truth about things that count; love for the inhabitants of the planet; love for the future. Because truth is all we’ve got. And if we don’t talk to ourselves, and if we don’t use every tool at our command in our time on Earth to tell the truth, nobody else will.

If that means we sometimes make errors, speak cruelly, carve caricature grimaces onto the raw flesh of books, so be it. Some golems are necessary.

I published a novel once, in 1977. As a long-time reviewer even then, I thought I was pretty well prepared to read whatever reviews this one garnered, good or bad or misprision. I thought the good reviews would be nectar, the bad ones gall, and the misprision irrelevant. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

But let me define misprision, because what it means is central. Misprision, says the OED, can be defined as 1) “a wrong action of omission” in law, 2) “an offense or misdemeanour akin to treason or felony,” 3) the same as 2, but transferred into popular use, 4) “wrongful capture,” 5) “the mistaking of one thing, word, etc., for another; a misunderstanding; a mistake,” 6) “a clerical error,” 7) “a malformation,” 8) “unjust suspicion.” Misprision, in other words, is what happens when a critic talks about a book. What I would like to suggest is not only that misprision is inevitable, but that misprision is the right stuff.

[The paragraph immediately above, and the rest of this piece, is a version of a programme book filler I wrote for Readercon 4, as modified later for the Friends of Foundation Newsletter. The piece contained what turned out – as no one noticed it or called me on it – to be an utterly dumb piece of “humour”: in going on and on about “misprision” without mentioning the famous American critic Harold Bloom, who had written several books, including A Map of Misreading (1975), on the very subject, I had – as it were – misprisioned misprision. Perhaps it was not entirely clear that this was supposed to be funny.… It’s true I’d written the original piece pretty quickly, but that was my own fault. The joke was no joke (the sound of a joke falling flat in the wilderness is a proof of the nonexistence of God) but a petard. For the Newsletter, I tried to save face by mentioning Bloom, within square brackets very similar to the ones encasing these words, and therefore unmisprisioning the misprisioning of misprision. But the editor ran out of space, and cut everything within square brackets. So I was doubly hoist. 1995]

My novel came out. It was called The Disinheriting Party. It received some reviews in the UK and Canada, none that I recall in the USA, but I’ve lost most of them and can’t check. Some of these reviews were positive; one at least was slashingly negative. I remember little of the praise or the accusations of perversity; but one review does stick in the mind. The author of this review [Paul Stuewe, in the Toronto Globe and Mail 1995] liked the novel well enough to think about it, though I don’t remember if he thought it was exactly successful. The important thing is that his review got the book wrong. The Disinheriting Party, it said, clearly owed a great deal to Latin American models, and was specifically indebted to the magic realist mode. Every page, he said, demonstrated the extent of the debt.

This was pure misprision, unjust suspicion, mistake, wrongful capture. In the 1970s I was a lot more ignorant than I should have been (or would have admitted then); the only Latin American authors I could remember reading were Jorge Luis Borges, and Jorge Amado for a book review, and it was pretty clear that it wasn’t Amado who was on the reviewer’s mind. He was thinking of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, writers I’d known of but had never encountered. So it was misprision. The critic had seen something that looked like truth, and he had imposed this “truth” on a text, had “interpreted” my precious novel, had pummelled it into a shape of his own devising, had made a Necessary Golem of my Work. He had recreated the book. Was I glad?

I was. This reviewer’s misprision is the only comment on the book I can recollect in any detail. It is the only review which represented a wrestling of the reader with the text, the only one which taught me anything about what I had written. By re-creating The Disinheriting Party, the reviewer had allowed me to look at it again, to see the thing as an autonomous text, no longer mine, no longer tied to me by the umbilicals and conceits and oneirisms of the creative heart. My book had become a Necessary Golem, smaller and colder perhaps than the first, but no parasitic Pale Fire, no Kinbote; my book was in the world now, and another maker had gone down into it; and in doing so had committed misprision. The Disinheriting Party had left home. Nothing (in other words) had happened that was any more alien to the workings of the world than a beloved son or daughter’s first fuck, out in the workings.

I’m dodging a few issues here, certainly. The misprision in question was, not at all unsubtly, a flattering one. The book did not suffer any derogation through being compared with a great tradition. And the reviewer was, in any case, literally in error, because the provenance, as he phrased it, was false (though it was certainly the case that even a false provenance – by showing how a book seems – can teach an author much more than ample praise, which merely confirms a dream). So let me [the original title of this Readercon 4 piece was “On Being Criticized” 1995] go on to something less congenial. In 1988 I published a book of reviews and essays which I called Strokes and which, like the earlier novel, got reviewed in a few places. Some reviews were good, some were not; and one review, published by Robert Latham in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts under the title “Snobbery, Seasoned with Bile, Clute Is,” was hilariously devastating. The review is very long, and rather hard to quote from, and although Latham makes the occasional tactical blunder (at one point, when he observes that “for a journalist commentator, [Clute’s] repertory of shrewd barbs and liberal plaints is well above average,” he sounds like a landgrant academic writing squibs for Kirkus Reviews in a doomed quest for tenure), the flow of his animus, as he assembles his argument, is refreshingly stinging: he mentions “wild rhetoric,” he instances a good deal of “obfuscatory smoke blowing,” he mocks “fumbles,” he deplores “sentences that skitter and swerve like demented ostriches … in a critical void,” he concludes that the “book is deeply disappointing as criticism.” Most of this seems to be good honest fun, the sort of thing a reviewer does if s/he’s on a roll: anybody who’s reviewed a book knows what I mean, knows the feel of the thrum of the slap as you get your teeth into the bone. It is a feeling Latham – who eschews rant, mainly – may have felt, this flow of contumely, this conative/cognitive come, this masque-gavotte around the shape of the thing being put in its place: you throw mud, it sticks. It’s a misprision, too.

But it’s not the real-stuff misprision that makes a critic into a co-creator. Co-creation through epithet merely parodies the thing abused. The misprision I’m interested in – and that I hope to be capable of committing upon the next book I review – is not a parody of the thing misprisioned, but what Dr. Frankenstein thought he was doing; it is a form of redemption: because until a text is properly pronged – properly violated – it’s dead meat. The words the author has given birth to are dead until they’re read, until they’re re-created by the critic (who is somebody writing a review, or somebody reading a book in bed, or somebody telling somebody else about something s/he’s just finished: who is anybody, in other words, who is doing the job). So it wasn’t until he began to screw me properly that Latham began to revitalize the meat. “Clute’s arguments skip and/or limp along from review to review, and the reader is forced to piece them together. (Perhaps this is fixup at the level of criticism.)” (Right on.) Clute “ultimately naïvely seconds the hermeneutic strategies of classic bourgeois narration, its preemption of options, its suturing and cloture of the self.” (Not, perhaps, uncomically put: but he’s saying something here about the unthought-through conventions that arguably fuel the green shoot chez moi: and which might underlie some of the cognitive paucity of much sf criticism.) “The only broadly animating focus I could divine” in the entire book, he continues, “was … a vague sort of modernism .…” But today “one requires a fairly comprehensive command of recent (postmodern) theory, the only framework capable of resolving all the paradoxes spawned by the binary logic of Clute’s modernist humanism.” [I now tend to think this particular assertion is a touch faddish 1995] But “hampered by an exhausted, martyrized modernism that demands a haughty, superior stance …,” Clute’s “critical practice has largely remained tied to the immediate, short-term concerns of generic production.”

I began to understand what it meant to be understood. To be misprisioned in the daylight of another mind. To see what it meant to obey a Protocol of Excessive Candour. I could chuckle at Latham’s inspired (though, one guesses, hardly conscious) imitations of the stylistic blunders I fell into in the more egregious flights of autodidactic BigThinking to which I was, and remain, so embarrassingly prone; but at the same time I felt that the strange scarecrow bumpkin of a book he saw in his mind’s eye did indeed have its own objective reality. I might object to his trashing an assemblage of unconnected pieces because they failed to accomplish something they were not written to accomplish – these pieces had, after all, been written over a 20-year period, for particular occasions, for fees, and couched in a variety of registers designed to affront and chivvy and pleasure a wide variety of audiences; and it was unlikely that they would, on being brought together, “articulate an immanent locus for critique.” On the other hand, it was clear that I sounded as though an agenda of that sort were being muffed. The very fact that a number of pieces by one writer was assembled in one place argued for agenda; and if no agenda was visible to analysis, then there was imposture afoot. The heart of Latham’s misprision is that I was an impostor.

Old son, you’re nicked.

As misprisions go, this seems fair enough. It is a sustainable reading of Strokes. In accomplishing this dismantling, Latham is performing the critic’s task: that of unmasking the being of the book; re-creating that being; freeing the book from the author of the book, and from the beehive cloister of the affinity group; and, in the end, granting a privilege. The author’s true privilege is to be misunderstood (how many of us, glaring into airless mirrors of unpublishable selfhood, ever get the chance?) and the critic’s true function is to make misunderstanding into a door of perception. So with Latham’s help, I open the door. I see how the book can be seen. There’s some fucking going on in the workings, but that’s life. And it all helps me see that when I, in turn, shape the books I review into what I understand them to mean, I shape them into monsters their parents might well weep to recognize: but at least, within sf, they are neighbourhood monsters. The blood kin monsters of sf wear, I do realize, my face. I give them my disease. Reviewing is raping the Golem. In the end, all we can do is beg forgiveness.

– Modified from: Interzone 24 (1988); Readercon 4 Souvenir Book (1991);

Friends of Foundation Newsletter (1992)

[In 1994 I got an Award – the Pilgrim Award, which is given annually by the Science Fiction Research Association – and went to Chicago in July of that year to receive it, and gave a short talk in thanks; a few sentences – not spoken in Chicago because of limited time – have been inserted 1995.]

Thanks must be my first word: thanks enormously for letting me in here. And in a few minutes, thanks will be my last word as well.

As a ringer in quite a few towers – as a non-English Englishman; as a writer of fiction who writes two stories a decade; as a non-academic who does bibliography with violent intensity; as a man of mature years who spends a good deal of his time writing with great passion book reviews for ephemeral journals; and as a solitary unsalaried freelance who spends the rest of his time, with a passel of colleagues, beavering away at encyclopedias – it is a most unusual experience for me to have a sense that I am coming home; but here I am, and I think I might well call it home.

The plane gives glimpses of Chicago as you land at O’Hare, but you never step into the same Chicago twice. The city I remember with supernatural clarity comes back to me now, over the steppes of the years, like sf or Oz, just as it came to me the first time. It was 1956. The airport that time was Midway. For a 16-year-old immigrant from Canada, who had spent the previous four years reading pulp magazines and Ace Books, the first sight of Chicago was like a vision of the Golden Age. Michigan Avenue – as far as the 16-year-old kid was concerned – gave off a Golden Age reek, raw and clean and real. Soldier Field was Nuremberg, without the camp smoke. And there was an iron web of subterranean roadways that underlaid the Loop like Caves of Steel. All in all, Chicago looked like what anyone who drew cities in Astounding thought a metropolis should look like. Chicago was where the Future Histories started.

A year later came the poison chalice of Sputnik, and although it took a long while to sink in, I suspect I was just the right age – like some vast baby duck – to find myself unconsciously bonded to disillusion, without yet knowing what it was I had lost. Certainly I’d lost the Golden Age of childhood, as we all do; but there was more than that. What I’d lost – and what sf had lost – after Sputnik had stitched its way back and forth across the new mundane sky, was the old sense that space was a magic portal, a sky-hook capable of hiking us into the future. What Sputnik did – what indeed the whole, archaic, doom-ridden space programme accomplished as it lunged into a future that did not work – was to drag traditional sf backwards into the real now. Space was no longer free space. Overnight, space became a sentence in the seamy contentious intricate story of humans upon the planet, a continuation of life on Earth by other means.

A child might not have noticed the change. An adult might have ridden it. A 17-year-old, on the other hand, might well have found himself stuck in midstream, only half aware that his dreamworld had been sign-changed into a continuation of homework. I don’t want to erect a few tiny coincidences into bad theory, but I rather wonder if it might not be modestly relevant that I was born the same year as two sf writers with whom I feel a particularly strong cognitive rapport – Tom Disch and Norman Spinrad – and that we all impacted late adolescence, the end of the Eisenhower years, and Sputnik at the same time. Let us put fiction aside, as I’ve never written enough to sort it: but as critics, all three of us have seemed at times to evince a certain strange pachydermatousness about sf, like lovers who will not admit their wound. I (for one) know how truculently thinskinned I’ve been at times, how savage I’ve been about any sf text which seemed – through cynicism or fake camaraderie or apeing of the old – to mock our loss.

Here is the mountain which this molehill makes: I think certain kinds of loss, inflicted on the psyche at certain vulnerable moments, make for natural critics. I do not claim that a natural critic is necessarily a good one, nor that those who failed to have something to feel abandoned about when they were seventeen must necessarily produce flawed critical works; only that the obsessive acts of secondary recreation which make up the work of the natural critic can be seen as a redemptive enterprise, and that what is being redeemed is the cracking of the Golden Age. I’d suggest, en passant, that the wounds which may spark a talent for creative writing almost certainly occur earlier in the life passage of the writer-to-be; and that the writer’s search for those wounds can take forever. What in particular marks the critic’s wound is that it is visible to the eye. What made me a critic was a loss I could read about in the newspapers.

But back to Sputnik. In all seriousness, I think it genuinely may be fitting – if we sidebar any cod theorizing about the wound that engenders the critic – to treat the beginning of the Space Age as a turning point, a point beyond which the quasiorganic conversation of American sf – for the moment let me call it First SF – began to ramble, and to lose the thread of the story; began to give off a sense that for all those years since 1926 it had been telling the wrong story, that we were now being shaped by futures which the sf story had failed to notice; began the long descent into the backward-looking, nostalgic, manic depressive, treasonous, faute-de-mieux blather of sharecrop. Before Sputnik, First SF had thrived in a native habitat, which included the moon and the stars as draws: speedlines pointing to the future and marshalling our dreams. Afterwards, new versions of sf, new conversations, began to collide with the dying gabfest of Future History, and First SF sporulated into a series of loose overlapping genres. As genre critics, it is right and proper for us to note that Sputnik changed – once and for all – the conversation of precedents that bathed First SF texts; that what followed was the teeming, immensely fruitful squabble we now inhabit, where old and new modes fight for lebensraum, Cyberpunk sagas cohabit with dinosaur senilities, sequels set in the worlds of dead authors share shelf space with postmodernist pastiches set in nostalgia-choked alternate-history Toontowns, where fossil singletons technically occupy the same genre as works of genius written long after the wrong story of the future shriveled up like a salted snail [see also “Exogamy Dentata,” p. 399].

Taking some few stabs at understanding this new world has filled up most of my working life.

It is also interesting, I think, to notice how markedly the new sf resounds to certain underlying continuities, base tonalities, that mark American literature as a whole. For me – speaking as an onlooker, as a ringer who lost his green card decades ago – it is remarkable how clearly the literature of the United States is marked by a sense of belatedness: a sense that the frontier is always beyond reach, or that when it is finally penetrated it will turn out already to have been abandoned; a sense that the Great Gatsby will never gain the garden or the city, no matter how hard he rows; a deep central disappointed knowing that the breast is shut. If this sense of things is at all accurate, then post-Sputnik sf has become all the more essentially American, now that its best authors tend to explore the recedingness of things, attempt to limn the uncapturable complexities of a world whose futures are profoundly various, profoundly pressing.

None of this alters the sense that First SF has become a bounded region, that its own, deeply unselfconscious belatedness is something we can – as it were – look back on as an object of study. Like the rockets at Cape Canaveral, First SF was tied to a version of history, and when that version passed it become part of a told story. A conviction of the usefulness of “belatedness” as a concept grew on me as I worked with Peter Nicholls, John Grant and Brian Stableford on the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) – as careers and motifs continued to obsess my dreams, while the years passed. I don’t think the Encyclopedia insists upon this thesis – it would be extremely inappropriate if it did argue, in an ex cathedra tone, a position which is both debatable and partial. But certainly, as I wrote, I felt, and I think my partners may have felt, that a large and significant and deeply loved part of what we were calling sf was, in 1993, a completed topic.

But if the old compact had told its tale by now, what on Earth was replacing it? If I was going to claim that the most significant American sf writers from 1960 on didn’t really write First SF any more, what on Earth were they doing? While working on the Encyclopedia, I backed away from thinking too much about answering this question, partly because the Encyclopedia – as Peter Nicholls originally conceived it in 1975; and as we all continued to think of it in the 1990s – was intended to represent a broad-church, non-prescriptive sorting of anything we thought might possibly be describable as sf. But the question remained.

In twenty years, I may begin to believe some of the answers I come up with. For what it’s worth, I tend at the moment to think that, over the last few decades, sf has begun to lose its profound attachment to the old set of Fables of the First World: tales whose protagonist, usually human, represents the dominant species in the venue being described, the species which knows how to get to the future. I think that sf stories today are more and more beginning to sound like Fables of the Third World: stories whose protagonists, often human, represent cultures which have been colonized by the future. The future may come in the form of aliens, or the catnip nirvana of cyberspace, or as AI’s, or as bio-engineered transformations of our own species: but whatever it touches, it subverts. Sf stories of this sort can – depressingly – read rather like manuals designed to train Polynesians in the art of begging for Cargo; but they can also generate a sense of celebration of the worlds beyond worlds beyond our species’ narrow path.

For me – to conclude – the Encyclopedia was not primarily designed to emphasize this change. In its sometimes manic comprehensiveness, it worked, in the end, for me, as an attempt to seal over the cracks in the Golden Age by surrounding the fissure. (Childless people – I am one – often tend to have large extended families.) For me, the Encyclopedia was an act of healing, on the part of a thin-skinned adolescent with a tendency to mourn.

In the end, standing here now in the late-century shadows of Chicago, I have to admit – it’s an oddly difficult thing to say – that I do feel moderately healed. I do feel that we’ve not been wasting our time. I think we’ve all been having a good conversation these last few years, about the literature we bend our heads over. In the end, then, as it was in the beginning, the first and last thing for me to say is Thanks.

– Science Fiction Research Association 213, September/October 1994

It may not be the worst thing that ever happened to sf that it died. Or became something sufficiently new that old books began to read like shed moult. There may have been a time, in the morning of the world, before Sputnik, when the empires of our