Clute
John Clute is a marvel. He's probably the most literary reviewer/critic in sf today; his reviews are sometimes a little hard to follow (his thinking about sf being often several steps beyond where I've gotten to, so I have to jump to catch up), and occasionally I think he's just wrong, but what he has to say is always interesting and often extremely insightful.
(And I just realized that his reviews are rarely solely about the work in question; they provide context, analysis, discussion of related works and the history of the work at hand and its genre, reference to the author's other work, and so on. In this respect he's much like my two favorite film reviewers, Richard von Busack of the San Jose Metro and Nick Lowe of Interzone. In fact, I think this is a lot of why I don't like Evelyn Lewes's TV column in Interzone; she appears to firmly believe that one should know as little as possible about a work's context when reviewing it, which means that rather than providing insight into why a work might be interesting, as Clute and RvB and Lowe do, she provides only a statement of whether or not she liked it. This is something I should bear in mind when I write reviews.)
Couple bits from the latest Clute review in IZ:
[The] home and venue [of sf so far] is the great anxious 19th and 20th centuries. . . . The genres of the fantastic . . . fit these centuries hand in glove. They are the literature of these centuries.
. . . [But] the door to the old future has shut behind us. The secret of the 21st century may be terribly simple: that there is nothing left to be anxious about, because it is already happening. . . . To embrace a world like that, a world which acts like sf without our having to push the start button, the genres of the fantastic will need to face some pretty radical surgery.
As is often true, I don't entirely agree with him, and I could argue or quibble with most of his specific points. (Sf is not the only literature suited to the 19th and 20th centuries; people have been saying that (as I elided from the above) "the Beast that slouched to Bethlehem is born" for a long time now; etc.) But what I take away from the above is a slightly new angle on something I've believed for a while: that every few decades, sf reinvents itself by taking a look around and beginning to imagine a new kind of future, based on the present. I wish I knew who it was who said that up until cyberpunk, sf was presenting the future of the 1950s; with cpunk, it began presenting the future of the 1980s. I think to a large extent it still presents the future of the 1980s, with occasional meanderings into the future of the late 1990s (specifically the dot-com bubble). It'll be very interesting to see what comes next.
(This ties in with someone's—Judith Berman's?—point a while back that we don't see much complexity in interstellar civilizations in sf; specifically, that such civilizations are still often caught up in the Manichean/Cold War mentality of two giant opposing powers, rather than a Balkanized universe with dozens or millions of powers in ever-shifting alliances. Manichean conflicts make good story, but often not morally complex story.)
Another tidbit from Clute:
Technothrillers are [structurally] rather like the secret sciences and conspiracy-ridden governments that make up their subject matter: information is always owned by somebody, and is generally released to readers in feverish partial snippets, as though security had been breached for us alone.
Okay, enough. Time to go read submissions.