The Guardian view on M John Harrison’s Booker win: a new frontier for science fiction | Editorial

The seemingly impossible has happened – M John Harrison's The End of Everything is the first science fiction novel to win the Booker prize. Fans have hailed this as a victory for a long-marginalized genre, though the author himself expressed characteristic iconoclasm, stating Writing science fiction is the last thing I want to do at an event before the prize.

Genre Boundaries

The sci-fi versus literary fiction debate has long been contentious. The late Ursula K Le Guin famously took Margaret Atwood to task for her reluctance to use the term science fiction for some novels, including Oryx and Crake: She doesn't want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto. Harrison doesn't want to break out of the ghetto; he wants to break it down. I really hate categories, and I really hate being categorised, he said.

Contemporary Relevance

Set in an unnamed seaside town in an unspecified future, The End of Everything depicts a disintegrating Britain after an alien species called the iGhettis invasion. The cause of the crisis remains unclear, with capitalism, ecological disaster, AI, and Brexit all potential factors. Ahead of Cop31, Ed Miliband claimed that the scenarios once of science fiction are now regular occurrences.

With news of Microsoft outages and cyber-attacks on supermarket freezers, the Booker judges' decision couldn't be more timely. As Atwood has said, science fiction is always about now. Harrison's novel reflects how science fiction responds to anxieties about scientific and technological discoveries on society.

Literary Innovation

Harrison has dismissed science fiction's world-building as the great clomping foot of nerdism. The End of Everything breaks down the rules of fiction, with no explanations or solutions offered. There are no explanations or solutions, no salvation, he explained, wanting readers to feel as confused and destabilized as his characters.

The Wasp Factory author, Iain Banks, published his science fiction novels under the name Iain M Banks to distinguish them from his mainstream work. This is no longer necessary. Whether Harrison's win marks a new frontier for publishing remains to be seen, but we are living in an age of fantasy that demands a polyphony of genres.