M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything was awarded the 2026 Booker Prize. This marks the first time that a sci-fi novel has won the prestigious literary award for works of fiction in English published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
The award marks the capstone of a 60-year career for Harrison, who published his first short story in 1966. The author is widely considered one of the most original voices in British fantasy and sci-fi. Harrison also worked as an editor, reviewer, and critic for New Worlds, a seminal magazine that contributed to the rise of the “New Wave” of science fiction in Britain in the 1970s. Harrison earned many awards over his long career, including both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick Award in 2007 for his novel Nova Swing.
The End of Everything is an homage to the British New Wave of sci-fi
The End of Everything is a post-apocalyptic novel that is as much about an alien catastrophe as it is about the efforts to ignore it. A sequel of sorts to Harrison’s 2017 short story, “The Crisis,” the book is set on the south coast of England. Protagonist Philip Tennent has moved to the small town of Dalston-on-Sea from London after the capital has been taken over by the ephemeral aliens known as iGhetti. Only that the creatures didn’t really “take over” anything; they just fluctuate and evolve, impervious to any attacks. And no one knows if they’re actually aliens, either.
Tennent scrapes by collecting alien artifacts from the beach and selling them. One day, something stranger than usual shows up: a baby-like hybrid that keeps growing and learning. But Tennent and his aunt Marnie are only interested in getting rid of it. Around them, a strange apocalypse unfolds. Extreme violence suddenly breaks out and refugees are trying to leave the British Isles to reach mysterious Europe; on the other hand, pensioners and weekenders regularly fill the cafés on the seafront, forsaking any efforts to make sense of what’s going on around them.
On his blog, Harrison described The End of Everything as something “that might have been submitted for serialisation in New Worlds in 1967.” In fact, the author’s body of work cannot be properly assessed without looking at the years he spent at New Worlds, where he built strong professional and personal ties with the most important British science fiction writers of that generation. Chief among them was Michael Moorcock (author of the Elric of Melniboné stories, among many others), to whom Harrison’s first novel is dedicated.
The New Wave was a movement that developed in Britain between the late 1960s and the 1970s, before becoming popular in the United States too. The authors associated with the movement applied the rebellious and experimental spirit of their time to a genre that had become extremely popular in the previous decades, but was still associated with a “lower” form of literature. New Wave writers eschewed the “hard sciences” that were the foundation of the work of their illustrious predecessors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. Instead, the New Wave drew from social sciences to step away from the pulp roots of science fiction.
New Wave writers shaped the modern perception of science fiction, opening the way for further experimentation in the following decades with the Cyberpunk revolution. Harrison can be rightfully counted among the likes of Moorcock, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and Kurt Vonnegut. The feeling of exploring something untold and unfathomable about human existence that recurs in many New Wave works is also strong in The End of Everything, which the author described as a portrayal of “the failure of explanation in society.”
M. John Harrison also wrote many books outside the confines of science fiction. The semi-autobiographical novel Climbers stemmed from Harrison’s passion for mountain-climbing, while The Course of the Heart is an urban occult fantasy story that had a major influence on the development of the New Weird genre.