The Booker Prize Gets Its First ‘Bona Fide’ Science Fiction Winner

Alex Marshall

LONDON: When M. John Harrison began his writing career, in the 1960s, he sometimes spoke with other science fiction writers about the genre’s poor reputation.

“Why shouldn’t a well written SF be considered to be literary fiction?” he recalled asking, during a recent BBC interview.

Some 60 years later, the idea that sci-fi writing cannot hit heights of literature has long disappeared. And on Monday, Harrison’s “The End of Everything,” a novel that imagines aliens overrunning Britain, won the Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award.

Gaby Wood, the prize’s CEO, said in a news release that it is “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world,” as opposed to past winning books by authors such as Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro that “borrowed facets” of science fiction.

Classicist Mary Beard, who chaired this year’s judging panel, said in a statement that Harrison had written a deft novel “that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile — and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism.”

“I really didn’t expect to be up here this evening, I honestly didn’t — here at the end of everything. But here I am,” said a visibly shaken Harrison — who, at 81, is the oldest author to win the Booker — when accepting the award. “You talk glibly about your life being changed, but it’s weird when it happens. I feel like a proper writer at last: totally lacking in confidence.”

In the novel, aliens called the iGhetti have taken over Britain. Harrison’s main character is a beachcomber who finds an alien “artefact” in the surf, then travels around the coast as it grows. At times, he tries to get rid of it; at others, he seems to bond with it. No one around him knows what the iGhetti want, or even how they arrived.

“Most popularly, they were seen as having ‘come out of the internet,’” Harrison writes. “Indeed, this was the favored theory of the internet itself; the medium still firmly — if a little desperately — casting itself as the message.”

While drawing on certain themes that are mainstays of science fiction — like apocalyptic disaster, dystopian life and human-alien contact — “The End of Everything” largely resists the conventions of the genre. Harrison, for example, dispenses with much of the world-building that anchors readers in unfamiliar worlds, opting instead for ambiguous and sometimes conflicting descriptions that constantly throw the reader off balance.

Harrison has said in interviews that he started his novel as an attempt to write “a novel about the failure of explanation in society,” and considered a disaster to be a good starting point. Beard praised the novel for showing that the apocalypse, if it ever happens, would “be incomprehensible.”

Harrison’s novel won out over two higher profile titles from past Booker winners: Marlon James’ “The Disappearers” and Douglas Stuart’s “John of John.” Elizabeth Strout’s “The Things We Never Say,” Luke Kennard’s “Black Bag” and Rebecca Perry’s “May We Feed the King” were also finalists.

Patricia Lockwood, who was one of the judges of this year’s prize, said she hadn’t known who Harrison was before picking up his novel, but that reading his work felt “like meeting the rest of your life.”

“I’ve read it five times,” she added. “I’ve written two essays about it, and a poem.”

One of literature’s major awards, the Booker Prize is awarded annually to the book selected by a panel of judges as the best novel written in English and published that year in Britain or Ireland. The award comes with a cash prize of 50,000 pounds (about $66,700) and, typically, a huge sales boost.

“The End of Everything” joins a prestigious list of past Booker winners, including, most recently, David Szalay’s “Flesh.”

Although relatively unknown in the United States, Harrison has long won acclaim in Britain with critics, some of whom have called him “the best writer you’ve never heard of.” John Self, in a review of “The End of Everything” for The Times of London, said Harrison has “been writing confounding, brilliant books for more than 50 years,” starting with his 1971 debut, “The Committed Men.” (Like his Booker winner, it is set in a dystopian Britain.)

Born in Rugby, England, in 1945, Harrison fed his growing love of literature while skipping school and reading novels in his local library. In the mid ’60s, he began publishing stories in science fiction magazines.

This year’s Booker Prize judges said that “The End of Everything” “can be read as a thriller, a mystery, a satire, a dystopia, a road novel, a work of realism.”

Although science fiction fans are likely to celebrate Harrison’s Booker win, the framing of his victory might annoy Harrison himself.

“I don’t represent a category — I’m me,” he said at a news conference held after the ceremony Monday.

“Genre cripples you as a writer,” he added. “You limit your audience, and I don’t want to do that. I want to talk to anybody, everybody.”