RHIZOME 1

by John Clute

I was beginning to think about the term rhizome. In botany it's a continuously growing underground stem which puts out horizontal adjuncts and roots and what may be called "explainers". It has been used analogously by Fredric Jameson, as I mention in the SFE entry on Fantastika, where I suggest, very tentatively, that it "might usefully dramatize a mind's-eye snapshot of fantastika as lenticular but never still, and growing (see above) at its rim." I think, rhizomatically speaking, there are legs in this.

But this afternoon an adjacent thought came to mind. I had just glanced at the SFE In Memoriam section and clocked that as of February 2026, it listed just over 1000 separate entries about sf figures (almost all of them authors) who had died since 2010, when we began readying the SFE for its going online in 2011. The various ways this made one think a bit need not be mused about here.

Except for one thought.

I found myself thinking back 70 years, to 1956, when the family compact of American sf -- which is to say for the likes of me sf-as-a-whole -- somehow seemed intact, familial, all of us within the same wall. We supped from the same mother. We were exhalations of what one might now call a rhizome.

Two things then happened which began to doomscroll the scriptorum we'd been waking to the morning in (is it Adam Roberts who hates sentences ending in prepositions? I love them a point up to).

1) The death of active writers who were never going to die.

2) Sputnik.

As for rhizome, I'm inclined to apply to certain kinds of text -- like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Little, Big -- which focus centripetally around a single family: horizontally and through time. More later.

John Clute has been writing SF and fantasy criticism since the 1960s, much of which has been assembled in several collections, beginning with Strokes (1988); he has been involved in writing encyclopedias since the 1970s. His novel Appleseed (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book in 2002. He is currently working on the fourth edition (online from 2021) of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and its affiliated Substack.