The End of Everything is a novel for our age of permacrisis. Genre boundaries belong to the past
“Science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L,’” began a New York Times review of Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake back in 2003. Now, 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-marginalised genre. The author himself was not so sure. “Writing science fiction is the last thing I want to do,” he said with characteristic iconoclasm at an event before the prize. The sci-fi v literary or “mainstream” fiction debate is as endless and battle-strewn as a fantasy saga. The late Ursula K Le Guin, a giant of the form, famously took Atwood to task for her reluctance to use the term science fiction for some of her 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.
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The Guardian view on M John Harrison’s Booker win: a new frontier for science fiction | Editorial