Every episode of the Coode Street Podcast tends to be an unedited, unplanned ramble through whatever circular discussion topic might occur to Gary and I. Generally, we’ve not discussed what we’re going to chat about beforehand, which means we’ve also not dont any particular research either.

This makes for a quick and relaxed preparation for us, and also makes the workload of doing a weekly podcast in amongst everything else we do manageable. What that means, though, is that it’s critical that we acknowledge when we’ve got it wrong, or have just not presented as balanced a picture as we should.

During Episode 167 of the podcast, Gary and I discuss fantasy, fantastika and things terminalogical. One of us – probably me (Jonathan) – incorrectly refer to “fantastika” as a term coined by our good friend and critic John Clute.  This, as commenters have correctly pointed out, is not true.   As John himself writes in the SF Encyclopedia:

“A convenient shorthand term employed and promoted by John Clute to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing science fiction, Fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres; (see also Equipoise; Horror in SF). The term has long been used in Czech, other Eastern European and Russian discussion of genre; it is the title of Bulgaria’s first sf magazine (formerly known as F.E.P.) and, as Fantastyka (which see) of Poland’s. Clute discusses the term in his Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (coll 2011), where he advocates the use of the term primarily to describe works of the fantastic after about 1800, when the genres for which it serves as an umbrella began to take on conscious form, and began tentatively to use the planet itself (past, present and particularly the future) as a default arena (> Ruins and Futurity). [JC/DRL]

John is quite clear about the origins and usage of the term, as should we have been. Our apologies, and thanks commenters for bringing it to our attention.