BOOKER PRIZE: M. JOHN HARRISON WINS WITH NOVEL 'THE END OF EVERYTHING'

M. John Harrison’s dystopian tale “The End of Everything” beat out higher profile books by Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout and Douglas Stuart.

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 S.F. 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.

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.”

- Author: Alex Marshall, The New York Times

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