{"id":1384,"date":"2003-08-19T09:11:45","date_gmt":"2003-08-19T16:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/08\/19\/1384.html"},"modified":"2003-08-19T09:11:45","modified_gmt":"2003-08-19T16:11:45","slug":"clute-on-atwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/08\/19\/clute-on-atwood\/","title":{"rendered":"Clute on Atwood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Last night I followed a link from a Boingboing message board (link provided by Alan Bostick) to John Clute's harsh <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scifi.com\/sfw\/issue325\/excess.html\">review of Atwood's <cite>Oryx and Crake<\/cite><\/a> from <cite>Science Fiction Weekly.<\/cite>  I would expect reviewers from the sf world not to be kind to this book, given how much Atwood's been trashing science fiction in her publicity statements about the book, but I trust Clute more than I might trust a lot of other reviewers looking at an sf book that was written by a literary fiction author and published as literary fiction.  (Even so, there are a couple of points on which I suspect, on no evidence and without having read the book myself, that Clute may've missed something; for example, I'm guessing that the presence of the name \"Oryx\" in the title suggests that the character may be intended to be a bit more important than Clute suggests that she is.)<\/p>\n<p>But the main reason I mention this review is that Clute's the only reviewer I can think of who'd use a phrase like \"the sclerotic exiguity of its backstory.\"  It's a rare review that sends me to the dictionary.<\/p>\n<p>(Hey, Jay, consider \"exiguity\"&#8212;or even \"sclerotic exiguity\"&#8212;a Story Words suggestion.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I followed a link from a Boingboing message board (link provided by Alan Bostick) to John Clute&#8217;s harsh&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}