‘We are dream-walking into a desperate situation’: the Booker prize winner on his sci-fi alien invasion wakeup call
With his twinkling eyes and silver ponytail, M John Harrison doesn’t seem anything like his 81 years. The M stands for Michael, Mike to his friends. And last night he became the oldest author to win the Booker prize for fiction, for his 13th novel, The End of Everything. Our interview is delayed because of wifi issues, which is fitting given that the novel is about – among many things – what happens when non-human intelligence takes over.
The End of Everything is the first sci-fi novel to have won the prize in its 58-year history, which is almost as long as Harrison has been writing. “It’s interesting,” he replies, when asked if he feels vindicated, “that something that has an SF-adjacent feel can be regarded as a serious book and given the Booker prize. My problem has always been that I don’t believe in genre. I don’t believe in it in any way.” He gently wags his finger at me. It is a bit like having coffee with a cheerier, more neatly bearded Gandalf – it will surprise no one that, in his youth, Harrison read The Lord of the Rings every year for a decade.
Whether he likes it or not, Harrison is hailed as a titan of literary science fiction. His fans have included giants such as the late Ursula K Le Guin and Iain Banks, as well as China Miéville today, and more surprisingly the Sex and the City star, and last year’s Booker judge, Sarah Jessica Parker. But he is not, as he would be the first to say, a household name. Although that has been changing. In 2020 he won the Goldsmiths prize for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and in 2022 he was himself a Booker judge.
The End of Everything took around 15 years to write, with real-world events overtaking him. AI, late capitalism, environmental collapse, the refugee crisis, Brexit – nearly all the manifestations of today’s omni-crisis can be found in the pages of this slim, elusive novel. As its title suggests, this is the work for our end times. “I suddenly thought, ‘Well, you’re 80, you might as well have a go at pushing it over the cliff one more time.’ My rule has always been push it as far as it will go, then move back slightly from the edge. But this time I thought, ‘Let’s push it over and see what happens.’”
And what happens is anyone’s guess. As critics have pointed out, The End of Everything deliberately resists definition. It is a triumph of obfuscation. “I could explain some of it to you,” the author says tantalisingly. “But no, I don’t want to.” For Harrison, the world ends not with a bang, but with endless confusion. “It was a book designed to present the explanatory collapse and epistemological collapse that you see in societies that have suddenly lost their grounding.”
He describes it as a mix of gothic horror, road movie, science fiction and fantasy – even “a seaside novel”. I would add satire to the list. One thing it is not, Harrison is clear, is a dystopia, but rather a post-disaster novel in the tradition of early JG Ballard or John Wyndham. But he wanted to play with the conventions; he didn’t want the reader to know more than the characters. “It would be ordinary sci-fi,” he says, “if you were told it was the triffids.”
Set in an unnamed coastal town somewhere in Kent (“If this is hell, it looks a lot like Margate,” as Peaky Blinders famously had it) in the nearish future, The End of Everything depicts a disintegrating Britain, after an invasion by an alien species called the iGhettis, which appear as “tall writhing bursts of light”. The iGhettis are a play on “I get it” (explanation), “I get stuff” (capitalism), Getty (extreme wealth), Apple (tech), I (Freud). “I wrote it down and I thought, ‘This is cheap.’ And then I looked at it again and thought, ‘Oh my God, there are so many ambiguities packed into that one word,’” he says with glee.
The germ of the novel was the financial crisis of 2007-8. “I had the rage, but I couldn’t make it work.” So he put what he had written away in a drawer and in 2015 “cannibalised” it for a short story called The Crisis. It was almost the end of him. During a reading of the story at an event in east London, he was struck by what felt like the worst indigestion of his life. “I thought, ‘That’ll teach you to down two glasses of red wine and eat pizza before performing.’” Two days later he was taken to hospital and told he’d had a heart attack. He was just shy of 70. When he returned to The Crisis, he realised it was the blueprint for a whole novel. “I was like, ‘Wow!’ And began to work on it.”
Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945. The closeness of the second world war overshadowed his childhood. “You were never allowed to forget it.” His father was an engineer, and the family lived on an estate of modern houses built for postwar key workers. One of the defining memories of his childhood was a Narnia-style wardrobe that, when he climbed into it, “was a library of trash novels” from 1920s thrillers to contemporary sci-fi magazines.
“It was full of all the things you weren’t supposed to enjoy,” he says with delight. He doesn’t know who the books belonged to. His parents had a very small bookcase with some classics downstairs in the lounge. “But it was the most extraordinary education for the imagination.” His father died when he was 13 and his mother never got over his death, something Harrison will explore if he ever writes his autobiography.
When he was 21, he published his first short story in the science-fiction magazine Science Fantasy. He became literary editor of New Worlds in 1968. He had a number of odd jobs – a groom at a hunting stables, a clerk, a trainee teacher. “Being a kind of hippy, I decided that if you were going to write, you would only write, and that you would take the consequences,” he says. That meant couch-surfing and often not having much to eat. “We were all living in appalling circumstances in west London before west London was west London,” he says of his fellow writers. “And it was great fun.”
Today he lives in rural Shropshire with his partner, the editor and writer Cath Phillips. He writes his first drafts in Moleskine notebooks, “always black and with squared paper” using Muji 0.5 pens, red and black. He is already working on an idea that may end up as a novel or short stories.
“Ever since I started in 1965,” he says, “my ambition has been to take down the divisions between genres. That’s been a guiding light.” As a reviewer for many years, he would ask: “Why should we be bad writers just because we’re writing science fiction? Why can’t we write good characters? Why shouldn’t we do it all?”
He is no longer angry with the publishing industry. “I’ve been mellowing as I age,” he says. He is now in his “late stage” as he calls it. “Older writers become knotty and gnarly. They just want to do what they want to do.” And this has worked. “I sold more books on the back of that position than I did by compromises with the industry.” And now he’s won its biggest prize.
The novel ends on what he calls “a positive” rather than a hopeful note. Does he feel hopeful for humanity? “No, I don’t feel any hope at all,” he replies bluntly. “We are just walking in a dream into a desperate situation. Somehow somebody has got to remind us that every action has consequences and that we’re ignoring them.”
Is that the responsibility of the novelist? “There are many,” he says. “To charm, to entertain. But I’ve always been Cassandra. It’s always a warning. ‘Be careful what you do.’”