After years on the margins, Harrison’s win for this resonantly disturbing dystopia brings the visionary writer the recognition he deserves
M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize
A Booker prize for M John Harrison, at 81 the oldest ever winner, symbolises an extraordinary 60-year journey from the margins into the limelight, without ever compromising on a literary vision that remains deeply weird and unique. The End of Everything is baffling, unnerving, confusing – very purposefully so. It follows two lost souls on the Kent coastline, beachcomber Phillip and his artist aunt Marnie, decades after alien entities called the iGhetti have leaked into our world and triggered a slow-motion social collapse. The City of London is a battle zone; strange biological “artefacts” are washing up from the sea; people are unpredictably affected by episodes of psychic rupture that they call, with classic British understatement, a “bad patch”.
But in the midst of catastrophe, what can one do but try to keep calm and carry on? In the real world, we’re currently supposed to be gathering our government-mandated three-day stockpile, though we’re not sure for what emergency – take your pick. And you can take your pick as to what the iGhetti might symbolise – late-stage capitalism? We are told they became more forceful in the 1980s, and cluster around the financial district. Brexit? In this novel, the continent does indeed appear to be cut off from England. Climate degradation? AI? The artefact that Phillip pulls out of the sea, hoping to sell it on the black market, shows the mimicry and uncanny self-actualisation of a large language model.
Some have balked at a novel where none of the characters knows what’s going on, and the prose scrupulously refuses to make things any clearer for the reader. “None of this made any sense to Marnie. In that, she shared the situation of around 8 billion other human beings on the planet.” Harrison has always traded in unknowing: in Climbers, his brilliant 1989 novel about his passion for rock climbing, by the end all the main character has learned is that “I didn’t know anything about anything”.
But Harrison’s own description of The End of Everything – “What happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?” – is a strikingly topical question for 2026. It’s precisely the uncertainty, the sudden violence, the sense that something incomprehensible is happening out of the corner of one’s eye, that makes it resonate so deeply. In the postwar period, writers such as JG Ballard and Nevil Shute channelled fears of ecological breakdown and nuclear armageddon. Now, it’s Everything.
Harrison started out in science fiction – a genre famously overlooked by the Booker – publishing his first short story in Science Fantasy magazine in 1966, and becoming part of the 70s SF New Wave with Ballard and Michael Moorcock. You can find the operatic wonder and alienation of space opera in The End of Everything, though here trained on Earth: in the wake of the iGhetti, “the night was crawling with new constellations”. (A sentence that made me think of Elon Musk’s thousands of satellites.) Phillip the beachcomber – the broken man looking for revelation and a change of fortune in his shoreline discoveries – is reminiscent of the noirish space wanderers in Harrison’s back catalogue.
From the beginning, though, Harrison butted at genre conventions, having more in common with the mavericks of modernism and existentialism: Olivia Laing put it perfectly, describing him as “the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf”. (Moorcock had him as “an anarchist aesthete”.) The SF Kefahuchi Tract trilogy in the noughties, and 2020’s Goldsmiths-winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again – an uneasy prequel to The End of Everything – brought rising acclaim for the delicate control of his understatedly beautiful prose as well as his visionary ideas.
Harrison is also a wonderful landscape writer, and in this novel his style is more visual and cinematic than ever. There’s a great depth of experience here – eight decades of seeing – with the effects of certain scenes closer to paintings than prose.
The most capacious pigeonhole for his work over the decades is the one titled “Weird literature”, taking in elements of SF, fantasy and horror, often through a politically aware lens. As Harrison declared in his 2023 “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here, “The Weird is a way of writing about the real” – however unreal it may feel. This Booker win is an unexpected but fitting reward for a spectacular novel and career. Harrison may not have courted success, but it’s found him.
