On 9 November, M. John Harrison was awarded the 2026 Booker
Prize and its £50k for The End of Everything (his 13th novel). At 81, he
is the oldest winner in the prize's history. The judges (chairing Mary Beard)
were unanimous in their decision. The Booker Prize Foundation described the
award as historic, with its CEO noting that Harrison was the first winner to come
out of the 'bona fide SF world'.
The response has been absolutely ecstatic. The press have
been all over the place, highlighting just how much the novel's sense of
apocalypse and doom mirrors our current anxieties. That's not in any doubt. The
more pertinent question is what the novel and the literary establishment that
have anointed it actually do with those anxieties. Does it give us any insight
into the forces pushing society toward disaster? Or does it merely present
those forces as mysterious and intractable, beyond human understanding? Harrison
is a very good and serious writer, and the award is in no way unexpected in
literary terms. The way the award has been celebrated in relation to The End
of Everything, however, tells us something about the prevailing attitude of
the cultural establishment that hands out these awards.
A beachcomber on a ruined coast
The End of Everything is set in near-future England where
the social order has been completely upended by some unspecified crisis. The
state is effectively non-existent, Europe is out of sight, and the iGhetti
(mysterious entities) are now involved in human affairs. At the heart of it all
is Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber living on the coast with his elderly artist
aunt Marnie. He makes a living picking up the oddities that turn up from the
Channel. His discovery of a thing that is changing, that is in fact a living
thing, and that starts to speak, is what sets the novel in motion. It's something
that grows and, in the end, completely undermines the characters' belief that
the world around them can be understood rationally.
Harrison's setting is eastern and southeast England, from
Hastings down to the Thames and into Suffolk. More significantly, he said the
themes and satire came from 'current affairs'. The official Booker description
captures the essence of his central inquiry: what happens when the very fabric
of the established order and the explanations we have for the world are in a
state of 'ongoing disaster', and yet we have to go on living in it?
The link to contemporary Britain is very obvious. You've got
a man literally trawling through the wreckage of a world he doesn't really
understand, looking for things to sell. That's a potent image of life in a
society which is in a state of insecurity and decline. That's where the book's
real subject starts to emerge. Harrison has also pointed to the 2008 financial
crisis as the novel's genesis. That's significant. The book isn't simply the
product of some eternal fascination with the end of the world. Its creative
origins are in one of the most pivotal convulsions of contemporary capitalism.
Catastrophe without causes
The 2008 crisis was the catalyst, but Harrison's imagined
method goes far beyond that. The crisis wasn't a natural disaster or an alien
invasion. It was the outcome of specific economic and social relations: the
enormous expansion of financial speculation, the huge build-up of private
wealth and private debt and a social order in which the economy is subordinated
to the imperative of profit. The austerity then imposed on working people was,
of course, also the product of political decisions and class interests.
In The End of Everything, the catastrophe is, in fact, very
opaque. The Booker Foundation describes it as an adventure "into the very
limits of human understanding" and the nature of the crisis is
deliberately obscure. The characters are in no position to really understand
what is going on around them. That obscurity is absolutely central to
Harrison's conception of the book. Mary Beard told the press that it's a story
of a society "going through a catastrophe which they don't really
understand". Even more telling in terms of Harrison's view of the book,
she said the point was that "when the catastrophe comes you won't know
what's happening".
Here is the book's central problem: what starts off as a
reaction to the breakdown of historical relations becomes a meditation on the
impossibility of ever really understanding that breakdown. Historical relations
(with their causes, their beneficiaries and their opponents) become an
overwhelming, incomprehensible force which simply crushes the individual.
That's not something particular to Harrison. It's a commonplace in contemporary
literature and film. Ecological collapse, pandemic, technological disruption,
war and social disintegration all come back as fate, as an inexplicable
eruption, as the inevitable outcome of humanity's supposed universal tendency
to bring about disaster. It's far rarer for them to be presented as the product
of historically developed social relations, which could therefore be understood
and changed.
Some people have actually suggested that the iGhetti is AI.
Others have suggested it's a commentary on capitalism, others on Brexit or
climate change. Harrison himself is very deliberately non-committal on the
matter. If we take the AI interpretation, that highlights the point. AI isn't
some autonomous intelligence that just turns up on an English beach. It's a
technology developed within a particular economic system and overwhelmingly
held by big corporations and states. The real questions then aren't so much
what AI might become as who owns and controls it, how it's used and what social
interests it serves.
Turning technology into an enigmatic guest whose ultimate
purpose is utterly incomprehensible risks reproducing exactly the ideological
veneer it needs to get through. Satire needs more than atmosphere; it needs an
object. Harrison's objects are often rather obscure: the natural human desire
for explanation, the persistence of the normal in the face of disaster,
commercial opportunism and the sheer absurdity of trying to apply the familiar
categories to a situation that has been utterly transformed. Those are all
legitimate and potentially very rich objects of satire. The social relations
which produce the catastrophe, however, tend to get lost behind them.
From the New Wave to the prize ceremony
Harrison's career absolutely merits serious attention
precisely because The End of Everything didn't just appear out of the blue. It
grew out of the very atmosphere of the New Worlds period, the seminal British
SF magazine of the day (the one linked to Michael Moorcock). Harrison was at
the heart of the British New Wave, and he was part of the movement that sought
to shake up the genre and its inherited assumptions. His subsequent work (the
Viriconium books, Light, Nova Swing, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again,
etc.) developed a particular prose style and a pronounced scepticism about any
kind of neat explanation. The Booker material makes it clear he was never going
to be comfortably pigeonholed. That scepticism was once genuinely subversive.
It rejected the technocratic fantasy of mastery as much as it rejected the
comfortable assumptions of much traditional genre fiction. His refusal to
construct a fully and neatly rationalised universe assailed complacency.
But of course this aesthetic has its other side. As the
political radicalism of the 1960s faded out in the 1970s and 1980s, so did a
large section of the intellectual and artistic world move away from the attempt
to understand society as a historical totality. The scepticism about false
certainty gave way to scepticism about the very possibility of objective
historical knowledge. Postmodernism provided the theoretical language for this
withdrawal, with its scepticism about 'grand narratives' (Marxism and the
various socialist narratives of historical development being the most obvious).
Harrison cannot simply be reduced to this tendency. His
writing is too individual, and his intellectual formation too complex, for such
a crude identification. But The End of Everything shares something of
this wider historical path: what begins as hostility towards simplistic
explanations ends perilously close to treating explanation itself as
impossible. At the post-award press conference, Harrison celebrated the erosion
of genre limits. He argued that the epoch of genres understood as “fences and
boxes, pigeonholes” was ending, and that a contemporary novel could combine
several genres simultaneously. Much
is to be welcomed in the destruction of snobbish barriers between “literary”
and genre fiction. However, formal hybridity is not in itself an artistic
breakthrough. A novel may contain a thriller, mystery, satire, dystopia, road
novel and realism simultaneously and still evade the most important questions raised
by its subject. The decisive issue in art is not how many forms a work can
combine, but how deeply and truthfully it penetrates reality.
Sugar, venture capital and “dynamite”
The Booker Prize has never existed in a vacuum. It's a
product of history and society. Literary prizes don't just drop down from the
sky to pass some kind of value-free judgement. They are institutions in their
own right, products of a particular economic and intellectual milieu. That
makes Harrison's reception so fascinating. After all those decades on the
periphery of British speculative fiction, he's finally been welcomed into one
of the country's most august literary institutions. That is, of course, a reflection
of his actual achievements, but it's also a sign of the death of the old divide
between 'serious literature and science fiction.
Yet the Booker set are very much in sympathy with The End of
Everything's vision of apocalypse. It's a world in which the normal structures
have all gone to hell, the future is terrifying, and nobody has the foggiest
idea what's actually happened. Mary Beard put it quite clearly as 'the politics
of now seen through the lens of the future'.
But what about politics? Contemporary official culture is
absolutely fluent in the language of catastrophe. Catastrophe is in fact one of
its key moods. Climate collapse, authoritarianism, technological dislocation,
pandemics, war and the prospect of total societal breakdown are all part of the
contemporary cultural landscape. What is largely absent from this is the notion
that these disparate crises have identifiable social roots and that working
people can consciously shape history.
The cultural establishment can therefore fully embrace the
image of apocalypse so long as the apocalypse is in some way ambiguous,
existential or intractable. It can be disturbing, it can be grotesque, it can
be surreal, it can be ironic and it can be utterly radical in its aesthetic.
The only thing it absolutely cannot be is a politically transparent apocalypse.
In that respect Harrison's novel is absolutely the book of its moment.
A “twinge of optimism”?
In announcing the judges' decision Mary Beard did say that
the book, in spite of its very dark subject matter, leaves you with a 'twinge
of optimism'. Harrison has been considerably more cautious on the subject. When
asked what he hoped readers would take from the novel he described the world of
the book as very grim and very likely to stay that way. The most you could
possibly say at the end of the day is that there might be a kind of 'relief'
rather than any hope or sense of closure.
The point is rather telling, really. What survives the end
of everything in The End of Everything is the sheer persistence of human
relationships and the sheer fact of people trying to go on when the inherited
explanations are no longer going to cut it. That should not be ignored. Human
solidarity in the face of social collapse is a valid subject for an artist, and
Harrison's emphasis on the persistence of the ordinary amid all that is going
on is clearly one of the book's major strengths.
But such solidarity remains fundamentally private and
defensive. People "muddle through" as Beard puts it. They're just
trying to get on with the business of living in the face of immense forces utterly
beyond comprehension. Muddling through is not the same as historical agency and
that's precisely where a materialist criticism has to go further than both
Harrison and his Booker contemporaries. The crisis of our time has produced
confusion, fear and reaction. It has also produced opposition. Workers, youth
and other sections of the population have not simply been the passive victims
of history. They have on numerous occasions attempted to resist the worsening
of their living conditions, the effects of austerity, inequality, the rise of
authoritarianism and war.
What's missing from so much of the contemporary dystopian
art is not necessarily an ounce of optimism (in the sentimental sense) but
agency. Harrison's novel is very attuned to the experience of social
disintegration. What it can't really convey is the sheer weight of the social
force which could in fact overcome it. That's probably why the book has been so
warmly received. You can be absolutely convinced that civilisation is in crisis
and yet remain profoundly pessimistic about humanity's capacity to rebuild it
on its own. That mixture of deep anxiety and political paralysis is in fact the
hallmark of much of the contemporary bourgeois cultural life.
The End of Everything is in fact more interesting than
either unqualified triumph or wholesale rejection would suggest. Its strengths
point to a contradiction. Harrison is absolutely right to see something real in
the picture: the social landscape in a state of exhaustion, the erosion of the
old assumptions, the odd persistence of the everyday in the face of disaster,
and the experience of the individual who increasingly feels the forces of
economic, technological and political change as something which is simply
happening to them from outside. The beachcomber trawling through the wreckage
is an image which has real social resonance.
But art has to go beyond the surface of things. The
fundamental flaw in Harrison's conception is that the mystification his
characters go through might well become the very principle that organises the
work. Their sense of being mystified by the forces that shape their lives
becomes the very assertion that those forces are in fact unknowable. That's a
very different route from the Marxist conception of art and history. Capitalist
society is mysterious precisely because the relations between people take the
form of relations between commodities, markets, corporations and all the
various autonomous technological forces. The point is not to fetishise that
mystery; it's to get through it.
The difference is absolutely decisive. "We don't
understand what is going on" is a perfectly legitimate starting point for
serious art. "What is going on cannot be understood" is a different
proposition and one which can easily become an excuse for helplessness. The End
of Everything is intelligent, disturbing and clearly takes the bewildered state
of life in a society whose institutions and assumptions are clearly on the way
out very seriously. Its refusal to offer any easy consolation is a real
strength. Harrison's achievement absolutely merits serious attention rather
than being ignored simply because of the acclaim it has received.
But its dominant conception fits perfectly with the view of
a cultural establishment that sees catastrophe in every direction and yet sees
no social force capable of surmounting it. What we need is not an artificially
optimistic literature, still less a literature of political propaganda in the
form of novels. Art has its own laws and will reveal truths which are beyond
the reach of slogans. The greatest art is art which sees beneath the immediate
surface the deeper movement of human relationships and of historical life.
The real challenge facing contemporary literature is
therefore bigger than just imagining the end of the world. It's about making
the utterly incomprehensible comprehensible, uncovering the human relations
beneath apparently autonomous forces, and restoring the human being to history
as more than a frightened spectator of their own destruction. The task of
coming to terms with "the end of everything" is inextricably linked
to the task of preventing it.
Bibliography
Primary text and works by Harrison
Harrison, M. John. The End of Everything. London:
Serpent's Tail, 2026.
Harrison, M. John. Light. London: Gollancz, 2002.
Harrison, M. John. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.
London: Gollancz, 2020.
Harrison, M. John. Viriconium. London: Gollancz,
2000.
Contemporary sources
The Booker Prizes. “Everything you need to know about The
End of Everything by M. John Harrison, winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” 9
November 2026. [thebookerprizes.com]
The Booker Prizes. “The End of Everything: Winner of the
Booker Prize 2026.” [thebookerprizes.com]
Loffhagen, Emma. “M John Harrison becomes first science
fiction author to win the Booker prize.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]
Jordan, Justine. “M John Harrison’s Booker prize-winner is
weird, challenging and strikingly topical.” The Guardian, 9 November
2026. [theguardian.com]
Story, Hannah. “M John Harrison wins 2026 Booker Prize for
dystopian novel The End of Everything.” ABC News, 10 November 2026. [abc.net.au]
Criticism and theory
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.
North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the
Politics of the Pseudo-Left. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2015.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the
Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. 1924.
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
