Incisive, unsparing, and vividly articulate, John Clute’s Scores charts the shifting terrain of speculative fiction through a critic’s lens. These reviews don’t just judge—they map, illuminating the patterns, innovations, and lightning strikes that shape the field.
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In Scores, did you enjoy barbed, witty short-form appreciations of SF/F classics and cult favorites?
If what delighted you in Scores was Clute’s quick, razor-edged wit and the way he can turn a two-page piece into a miniature map of a book’s virtues and sins, Jo Walton’s bite-sized essays will feel like candy. Her rereads of authors Clute also champions and skewers—like Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books or C. J. Cherryh’s Alliance–Union novels—deliver the same conversational sparkle and sharp insight, with affectionate candor and the occasional well-aimed jab.
In Scores, did you enjoy opinionated, luxuriant prose elevating (and eviscerating) fantasy’s aesthetics?
If you loved the lush, high-wire sentences and fearless verdicts in Scores, Moorcock’s critical tour through fantasy’s language and moods will scratch that itch. Like Clute at his most lyrical and uncompromising, Moorcock praises writers such as Mervyn Peake and Angela Carter for their rich texture while flaying work he finds thin—arguing, in rolling, baroque cadences, for fantasy that feels truly strange and alive.
In Scores, did you enjoy a rigorous taxonomy that clarifies how fantastika works on the page?
If the conceptual fireworks in Scores—Clute’s coinages and frameworks for how fantastika behaves—hooked you, Mendlesohn’s model of portal, immersive, intrusive, and liminal fantasy offers a deep intellectual payoff. She dissects books from The Lord of the Rings to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell with the same taxonomy-minded clarity Clute brings when he anatomizes worldbuilding and narrative protocols.
In Scores, did you enjoy wide-ranging, personal essays and introductions that celebrate and contextualize SFF?
If you enjoyed how Scores gathers many short, self-contained pieces that build a mosaic of the field, Gaiman’s essays and forewords offer that same mosaic in a warmer, anecdotal key. His tributes to Gene Wolfe and Diana Wynne Jones, reminiscences about Harlan Ellison, and meditations on why we tell fantastical stories echo the curatorial breadth and love of the field you found in Clute’s collection.
In Scores, did you enjoy sharp, satirical criticism that exposes literary gatekeeping with scalpel humor?
If part of the appeal of Scores was its sardonic edge—those moments when Clute coolly dismantles received wisdom—Russ’s satirical manual of the many ways critics and institutions erase women’s work will resonate. Her deadpan categories (from “She didn’t write it” to “She wrote it, but…”) are as quotable as Clute’s barbs, and they’ll change how you read the reviews and histories he interrogates.
