As M John Harrison was announced as the Booker prize winner on Monday evening, the 81-year-old looked gobsmacked. Decades into his career, and long overlooked by the mainstream literary establishment, he had just won a prize that has never before rewarded a writer known for science fiction, with a decidedly fantastical book.
His fans, many leading authors among them, are thrilled. “For decades it was a standard – and correct – nerd whine to point out that sentence for sentence, book for book, Harrison was one of the greatest writers out there, full stop, but that ‘mainstream’ prizes never reflected that,” says China Miéville, who last week won the Goldsmiths prize with his 1,200-page speculative novel The Rouse. Back in 2002, Miéville wrote that Harrison not having won a Booker by that point proved “the bankruptcy and back-slapping generic snobbery of the literary establishment”. Now, he says: “I am so delighted, for Harrison, and for fiction.”
While some past Booker-winning authors draw heavily on SF – Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan – Harrison is the first winner from the “bona fide SF” sphere, said Booker prize foundation chief executive Gaby Wood on Monday. The Pulitzer and the Nobel rarely take notice of SF either, though the latter has honoured Ishiguro and Doris Lessing – both of whom are considered literary writers who dabble in SF, rather than purists, and thus perhaps considered more palatable to a wider reading public.
Ishiguro says that when he emerged on to the British literary scene, he was “mystified” as to why the establishment had “fenced off SF into a ghetto”. He believes it’s done “real harm to the development of ‘literary fiction’ in the UK”, and he “personally felt liberated to go in that direction only in the early 2000s, after noticing – and envying – the brilliance of younger writers like David Mitchell and Alex Garland who were clearly inspired by SF, comics and games”. He notes, however, that his mentor and teacher Angela Carter had “no such prejudices”, often using SF elements in her work.
He points out the contrast between the patronising attitude of the mainstream literary establishment and that of cinema: “even the most highbrow of critics” venerated Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris as “milestones of cinema history”.
Author and critic Olivia Laing agrees it’s taken the literary world “an embarrassingly long time to clock that you don’t need realism to write about how it feels to inhabit late capitalism and unravelling modernity”. Harrison has “finally got his dues” with this week’s win.
Harrison’s winning book, The End of Everything, might be called a polycrisis novel. It sees mysterious alien phenomena called iGhetti cropping up on Earth, where they increasingly warp the fabric of reality. The extraterrestrial beings may stand in for AI, climate degradation, political chaos, Brexit, runaway capitalism, or all of the above.
So while there are futuristic elements, the book very much feels like a story about now. “I gather that somebody at the award ceremony asked Harrison if he had ‘any predictions for the future’,” says the novelist Michel Faber. “That typifies the obtuseness of people who just don’t get what the best so-called ‘science fiction’ does.” The End of Everything is firmly about the present – “an elucidation of the future we’re already living in”, adds Faber.
The recognition will surely bring Harrison a host of new readers – perhaps even former SF sceptics, for whom the book will prove that the genre can be both literary and acutely politically current. NielsenIQ BookData reported that sales stood at 13,400 copies pre-win. Based on previous years, Harrison can expect to sell tens of thousands more copies in the months to come.
Harrison’s win is a “huge victory for the seriousness of genre fiction as a project”, says the novelist Julia Armfield, who cried when she heard the news. Though it is also a win for the type of fiction that “resists decoding”. Indeed, as Harrison said in an interview with the Guardian this week: “My problem has always been that I don’t believe in genre.” He described the book as “SF-adjacent”.
Certain kinds of writing “make genre concerns seem beside the point,” says the critic and novelist Chris Power. Even in Harrison’s more purely SF books, he subverts the genre, “deconstructing sci-fi tropes and questioning the militarism of sci-fi”. Since he began writing in the 60s, he’s “always been queering the pitch”.
after newsletter promotion
Harrison is a “writer’s writer before he is a science fiction writer”, agrees novelist Isabel Waidner. In a commercialised publishing culture “which tends to reward conventionality, including arguably arbitrary genre conventions”, Harrison writes fiction “that pushes preconceived ideas of what a novel is”. Power suggests Harrison’s work shows that genre brackets may be more useful from a marketing perspective than an aesthetic one. “A lot of the most interesting novels have always muddled these things,” he adds.
The novelist Jeff VanderMeer says he tries to avoid the “genre v literary” debate – he believes it’s “meaningless or, quite frankly, just kind of boring or not useful”. He adds: “What I do care about is when that debate, from either ‘side’, reduces complex works of fiction to caricatures. Or when it serves a gatekeeping function that reduces access to prestige or readers that has little relationship to the quality of the work.”
Reviewing Harrison’s 2023 “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here, Power described Harrison as “the best British writer you’ve never heard of”. Three years on, the literary establishment has woken up, and Harrison is suddenly famous, his fans basking in the Booker glow. Waidner puts it like this: “His win is a win for literature, for us, and for that most endangered of things – thinking.”
