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.

"[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).

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.

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).

In 1960, he served as Associate Editor of Collage, a Chicago-based "slick" magazine which ran only two issues; it published early work by Harlan Ellison and R. A. Lafferty.

"[9] Clute's second novel, Appleseed (2001), is the story of trader Nathanael Freer, who pilots an AI-helmed starship named Tile Dance en route to the planet Eolhxir to deliver a shipment of nanotechnological devices.

His language can be as blunt and amusing as it is honest; some review columns have such titles as "Nonsense is what good adventure SF makes silk purses out of",[11] "Prometheus Emphysema",[12] "An empty bottle.

Contributing the essay on himself for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Clute wrote that his "criticism, despite some curiously flamboyant obscurities, remains essentially practical; it has appeared mostly in the form of reviews, some of considerable length.

Clute is the master of periphrasis and the circling, reiterated metaphor, employing pyrotechnic diction to summon insights that are at once calculated and spontaneous.

... What is clear from The Darkening Garden is that Clute has read and internalized a vast range of books and cites them with accuracy and precision.

[21]Hilary Bailey, reviewing The Disinheriting Party, wrote, Clute's comic timing is always right, and like a good racehorse he keeps his wind to the end.

Choosing a complicated plot, he may be making the story go too fast to sustain the weight of imagery he puts on it, moving too quickly to reveal everything he idiosyncratically sees.

SF reviewing has often had a strong tendency to be plot-oriented or to gush over technological content, whereas Clute's recensions of plot tended to make him appear effortlessly superior to the plodding book in hand, and his expansive loquacity and highly dramatic style of writing could arouse hostile feelings of inferiority in SF fans.

and admires Clute's continuing capacity to oversee the field every year, his willingness to at least check out the dross as well as engage the golden few.

Many of us who read so much genre stuff come to a point, or so at least I suspect, of casual acquaintance, and so give fairly 'enjoyment-oriented' reviews that simply say, 'if you like this kind of thing you will like this one.'

": It's a bold, energetic pouring-out of Clute's vision of a future civilization in which social display is an obsession, and where the line between style and substance is blurred.