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Scores: Reviews 1993-2003.

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John Clute. Scores: Reviews 1993-2003. Harold Wood, Essex, UK: Beccon Publications, 2003. 428 pp. $27.00 pb.

How to approach Clute? How to approach an ineluctable cultural edifice whose critical perspicacity I greatly respect, but whose elliptical prose I occasionally have trouble understanding? When I first became seriously interested in science fiction the gold standard for book reviewing was the work of Damon Knight and James Blish. For several decades now, however, that standard has been found in the work of John Clute, editor, with Peter Nicholls, of the monumental Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and, with John Grant, of the equally impressive Encyclopedia of Fantasy, author of two previous magisterial collections of book reviews and essays, Strokes and Look at the Evidence.

How to approach Clute? First, there's the matter of the sheer quantity of his work. Is there any important science fiction or fantasy novel of the past decade that the man hasn't read and reviewed? Scores's table of contents reads like a who's who of contemporary fantastic fiction, with the work of virtually every writer of significance making an appearance at some point in the listing. Clute's interests range widely over the field, from the more traditional science fiction of Poul Anderson, Hal Clement and Larry Niven, to the new space opera of Iain M. Banks, M. John Harrison and Alastair Reynolds. He covers the best recent SF of Sterling, Gibson, Willis, Swanwick, and Kim Stanley Robinson, but also the work...

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