Blissbat.net

If, like me, you’ve been distressed at the disappearance of John Clute’s years of Excessive Candour columns from the web in the wake of SciFi.com’s idiotic, deck-chair rearranging rebranding to “Syfy”—or if you’ve simply never had the pleasure of reading through Clute’s extraordinarily literate and witty book reviews—I have some links for you, courtesy of the divinities at the Wayback Machine.

• The sidebar of this review, from Issue 457 of Science Fiction Weekly, includes links to dozens of Clute’s columns going back to Issue 42.
• There’s another batch, apparently published in a later version of the SF Weekly site, that don’t seem to be archived together in any coherent way, thanks it seems to a complete lack of regard on the part of the site’s architects for those readers who might wish to re-read columns, or who have not followed SF Weekly since its fetal days. Here’s a hand-rolled list of archive.org’s copies of these columns:
  • Shadowbridge
  • The Quiet Girl
  • The Commons
  • Red Spikes
  • Axis
  • The Dog Said Bow-wow
  • Mainspring
  • Spook Country
  • The SFWA European Hall of Fame
  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
  • Four Novels of the 1960s
  • Jamestown
  • The Terror
  • Ysabel
  • The Book of Dave
  • Against the Day
  • The Road
  • Three Days to Never
  • The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
  • James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
  • The Possibility of an Island
  • Babylon
  • A Darkling Plain
  • In the Forest of Forgetting
  • 20th Century Ghosts
  • The Vengeance of Rome
• Finally, you can follow Clute’s current and most recent columns at SCI FI Wire, Science Fiction Weekly’s successor.

It’s more than a bit upsetting that the archives of a magazine that has published much of the best criticism of Anglophone Science Fiction and Fantasy literature have been tossed away like fish wrappings. We’re very lucky to have the archive.org people fighting to save these first few decades of internet culture from being erased by shortsighted fools.