John Clute – författare

The first known dust-jacket to appear on a book in the UK dates from 1819.

Sadly, almost none of these jackets have survived. The one institution primarily responsible for this vandalism is the British Library, which removed dust-jackets from every book it accessioned, and destroyed almost all of them. As a result, almost no hardbound book accessioned by the Library after the middle of the nineteenth century was in fact presentable in a visual context: no dust-jacket artwork survived to brighten the theatre of the book; no flap copy to articulate the rituals of expectation and entry that coded successive unveilings of this transgressive literature.

In The Book Blinders, distinguished critic, editor and novelist John Clute looks at 115 books whose jackets have survived out here in the real world. They escaped the burning. Each has a story to tell.

The Klavier Station has been silently ambling through the empty sectors of the galaxy for longer than anyone can remember. If it hides a mystery, it is well concealed. Nathaniel Freer, a trader en route with a cargo of dedicated nano-robots, knows that he has been manoeuvred into stopping for repairs on Klavier having survived what was made to look like a botched attempt at piracy. And once there, he gradually begins to understand why. For his cargo is destined for a recently colonized planet whose only export promises to revolutionise data-processing. That export has a remarkable, ancient connection, with Klavier. And if it''s reawakened, the universe will become a very different place.Fast-paced hard SF at its best, APPLESEED is a fireworks display of storytelling. More information on this book and others can be found on the Orbit website at www.orbitbooks.co.uk

Pardon This Intrusion gathers together 47 pieces by John Clute, some written as long ago as 1985, though most are recent. The addresses and essays in Part One, "Fantastika in the World Storm", all written in the twenty-first century, reflect upon the dynamic relationship between fantastika - an umbrella term Clute uses to describe science fiction, horror and fantasy - and the world we live in now. Of these pieces, "Next", a contemporary response to 9/11, has not been revised; everything else in Part One has been reworked, sometimes extensively. Parts Two, Three and Four include essays and author studies and introductions to particular works; as they are mostly recent, Clute has felt free to rework them where necessary. The few early pieces - including "Lunch with AJ and the WOMBATS", a response to the Scientology scandal at the Brighton WorldCon in 1987 - are unchanged.

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world. Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively. 125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.

Stay gathers together 100,000 words of reviews, plus short fiction by John Clute, and was originally published to coincide with Loncon3 (the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention) at which he was one of the Guests of Honour.Also included is a complete reprint of the text of The Darkening Garden.