“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.”

William Blake

It is difficult to know where to start. Stay is the fifth collection of John Clute’s reviews and essays to date, and stands alongside a couple of monographs (and hell knows how many other uncollected bits and bobs) as the latest waystone on a career path significantly longer than your humble correspondent’s life-span to date. I say this not to revel in my (increasingly relative and nominal) youth, but to delineate the scope of the problem at hand: how to distill a lifetime’s cogitations on genre fiction into something coherent and accessible, while avoiding the lobster-pot of oversimplification?

The latter half of the problem is the more easily avoided, simply because Clute’s work—both at the molecular level of individual pieces, and the molar level of his entire oeuvre—is not amenable to simplification. One does not go to Clute for snappy synopses and comparative recommendations; his reviews are not reviews in the limited and essentially commercial sense that the term now represents in the era of Goodreads and Amazon. Indeed, Clute’s own frustration with the current book-cultural hegemony—in which the reader must be treated as a special yet narrowly discerning snowflake whose existing tastes and prejudices should remain unchallenged, if not be pandered to outright—bubbles to the surface often in the reviews collected herein, chiefly in the form of barbed asides against the tyranny of the Spoiler Police. Spoilers, Clute seems to suggest, are the enemy not only of good critical writing, but of good writing, period; if we are forbidden to discuss the endings of novels—which are, after all, an essential functional component of the work—then how are writers supposed to get feedback on what works and what does not? “We can’t talk about what we can’t remember,” as he puts it.

The Spoiler Police almost certainly don’t read Clute anyway, so the point is moot. And I suspect that those who do read Clute do so not in search of for good-or-bad recommendations, nor for ratings of one to five stars (or—heaven forfend—one to five tiny rocket wingdings). Personally, I read Clute for the erudition, the wordplay, and for the collected experience of decades in the saddle: even if you don’t agree with the guy, any opinion he has to offer is based on a lifetime of reading, and of writing about what he reads. While Clute has been a prominent advocate of the notion that it is no longer possible to “keep up” with the entire output of a genre, or even just with the best bits, he’s also among the few who managed to do so, back in the days when it still was possible. What Clute thus brings to any genre reader under the age of forty is context, the occasionally irascible but always idiosyncratic back-streets knowledge of a life-long dweller. He knows his way around—and if the route you’re taken by isn’t the straightest or shortest, you can bet it’ll at least be scenic.

Part of the problem is the way in which a critical writing oeuvre is a more cumulative thing than a fiction oeuvre. Certainly, a fiction writer’s personal canon will grow cumulatively with time, and with it a sense of what that author’s work is “about” (or, perhaps more accurately, in what it is interested). But the novel and the short story (shared worlds and interminable multi-volume epics notwithstanding) are both fundamentally stand-alone forms; while they may benefit in various ways from being read in conjunction with other works, it is generally not necessary—provided we ignore certain postmodern anxieties of influence—that one has read those other works to enjoy the piece. Critical writing can (and should) be capable of standing alone, of course, but it is also inescapably part of a longer conversation between not only the critic and the work under consideration, but also with other texts, other critics. We might say, then, that the critic is creating something like an epistolary narrative: a single letter in isolation may well tell a story, but it is the cumulative effect of many letters that reveals the grand narrative, as well as the character of the narrator in relation to the world.

So critical writing is a genre in the same Bakhtinian sense that science fiction is a genre: each piece is self-contained, like a tile in a mosaic, but the pattern of the tile may make a wider, deeper sense when seen in the context of the grand design in which it has been placed. In “proper” academic criticism, that grand design is the evolving backdrop of contemporary literary theory; with Clute, while academic work certainly gets an occasional look-in, the grand design is largely his own, patiently assembled from years of insight and cogitation, a literary Ferdinand Duval. The scale of this achievement should not be understated: to construct an original theoretical framework—a critical system, if you will—from the ground up, with reference predominantly to primary texts (the stories and novels) rather than secondary (critical or theoretical discussions), is the work of a lifetime.

But as mentioned above, that system is not amenable to concise summary, although Stay—thanks in no small part to the inclusion of the full text of “The Darkening Garden”, Clute’s hard-to-find chapbook lexicon of horror—perhaps comes closer to delineating the thing than any previous collection. There is a sense of decades-long threads being tugged together, skeins of argument braiding into something approaching a pattern… but interestingly enough, it seems that the nature of the thing we’ve called science fiction may have only become apparent in the process of its passing from the stage.

To unpack that claim, however, I am obliged to dabble in the simplification I’ve heretofore tried to avoid. So, with the broadest of brushes: for Clute, science fiction, horror and fantasy are sub-phenomena of a broader, more nebulous genre named Fantastika. This zooming-out offers an escape from the insoluble problem of defining science fiction as distinct from its sibling non-mimetic/non-realist genres (fantasy, horror etc.); sf thus becomes merely one significant (yet fractured) landmass among an archipelago of others, which nonetheless share a similar epistemological and ontological climate. And Fantastika is, if I’ve understood it correctly, coextensive with capital-S Story; at any rate, “any Story is inherently non-mimetic”, and “absolute Story is absolute Fantastika”, and Fantastika has “an inherent non-allegorical bent”. Fantastika is not metaphorical, then, but a genre wherein the work “is a kind of representation of itself”; at its apogee (as, Clute suggests, in the movie Under The Skin), Fantastika is “pure Story: not a lesson, but the thing told”.

So what of science fiction, then? Sf is (or was) “the literature that said the Twentieth Century was going to work”, and “[sf] stories can only be pronounced in worlds which are not yet sf”; these quotes come from a review of Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, a book which “announces the death of the old tongue”, while later on, Miéville’s Embassytown is tagged as “the sound of sf past and present struggling to become a single book”. Later still, we learn that in 20th Century sf “the reward for saying yes is the future”, while in 21st Century sf, “the reward for saying yes is death”. Meanwhile, traditional sf has become “a Somme of monuments to that which was never there in the first place”, the lacunae in question being the emptiness in the promises of Progress (the dominant undead metanarrative of the liberal West); “stories set in sustainable worlds are congratulations about some story that has already been told”; and trad sf “entails magical thinking […] a form of seduction, a relic of Enlightenment Whiggery: reality is told by winners.” Phrased thusly, the death of sf (or its regeneration, for the optimists among you) is clearly of a part with the growing cultural backlash against neoliberalism and technoscience, which are two sides of the same obolos; to steal a phrase from William Gibson, we have learned to distrust that particular flavour.

To really explain the demise of sf, though, we have to dig into the lexicon of horror, because it turns out that horror and terror hold the clues to the radical cultural break with the aforementioned Enlightenment Whiggery from which Fantastika emerges. Fantastika “is born at a point when it has begun to be possible to glimpse the planet itself as a drama […] because it is at this point that Enlightened Europeans were […] beginning to think that glimpsing the world was tantamount to owning it”—a transitory period dramatised by Neal Stephenson’s wrist-snapping Baroque Cycle, and surely not coincidentally. With this comprehension of the world-as-system comes creeping the realisation that we are Bound to the world (both in the literal sense of the word bound, and in the more specific narrative sense Clute has in mind); in opposition to the fictive “realism” of mimetic fiction, “the Fantastic exposes the lie that we own the world to which we are bound”. Old-school trad sf—in which the reward for saying yes is the future—was an attempt to plan our way out of the jaws of that horrific realisation, just as good competent engineers would do.

But engineering is a problem-solving discipline, not a problem-identifying one—and the environmental (and hence existential) elephant in the room is now so plain to see that only the most dogmatic and hidebound proponents of scientism would dare to claim we can just roll it back out through the door. Sf spent half a century or more writing cheques it would never be able to cash, and now splits into two broad factions: one publicly burning its high-school poetry by way of penance, the other trying to hustle free drinks out of bar-flies with tales of the Good Old Days™ (coming soon from Baen Books). And so—to graft on an inelegant theory of my own—we’re left with a genre scattered along the five stages of grief: denial and/or anger (in the form of “those hard SF manuals for the 1% we still sometimes get tricked into reading”—zing!), bargaining (see Project Hieroglyph’s attempt to reboot sf-as-inspirational-pablum-for-engineers), depression (that 21st Century sf harbingered by Miéville, Bacigalupi and others, wherein the reward for saying yes is death) and acceptance (few examples, but Bruce Sterling is a possible candidate).

That the world-as-system lies at the heart of Clute’s theory is perhaps unsurprising—scratch any theorist hard enough, and you’ll find a systems analyst lurking beneath the hammerite. But it is interesting to note that the weird little subgenre of sf which takes systemicity as its subject seems critically opaque to Clute, the master systematiser: he gets little traction on Sterling’s Caryatids, for example, and (in my opinion) misparses Schroeder and Rajaniemi’s systems-centric approaches to post-Singularity fiction. And then there’s his (uncharacteristically trad-sf) resistance to the systematising efforts of others, herein represented by Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds, which is (gently) berated for refusing to use the established terms and framings when discussing sf—even though it’s fairly clear that Atwood quite deliberately avoided the established terms and framings, precisely because she’d have then been bogged down in decades-old debates and terminology which she considered irrelevant to the point she wanted to make.

But who’s right—Clute, or Atwood? For my money, it’s both and neither: both theories let me look at a big canon of literature in a useful way, but neither offers a truly totalising theory (which, as a card-carrying postmodernist, I believe in any case to be an impossibility). If I could convince you of one thing that might change the way you read a book like Stay—indeed, one thing that might get you to read a book like Stay at all—it would be that you are in no way obliged to agree with the critics you read, except on the basic point that literature is worth arguing about. And if you don’t believe that, why were you reading this review?