M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for fiction for The End of Everything, making him the oldest author ever to take the award and putting a science fiction novel at the top of it for the first time in the prize’s 58-year history.
That is the kind of result that changes how a book is talked about overnight. Harrison’s novel is set in an unnamed coastal town somewhere in Kent and has been described as a seaside novel as much as anything else, even though it folds in AI, late capitalism, environmental collapse, the refugee crisis and Brexit. He said it was “interesting” to see something with an SF-adjacent feel treated as a serious book and given the prize, and the reaction matters because the Booker has long drawn a hard line between literary fiction and genre work. This one crossed it.
The book did not arrive quickly. Harrison said it took around 15 years to write, and by the time it won he had already spent so long on it that he was willing to push it “over the cliff one more time.” He called the novel a mix of gothic horror, road movie, science fiction and fantasy, which helps explain why it resists neat shelving. It is about what happens when non-human intelligence takes over, but Harrison also said he does not believe in genre at all, only in pushing a book as far as it will go before stepping back from the edge. That makes the win sharper, not softer: the prize has not just rewarded a sci-fi book, it has rewarded one that refuses to behave like one.
Harrison is not a newcomer to the argument over what counts as serious fiction. He won the Goldsmiths prize in 2020 for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and served as a Booker judge in 2022, so he has seen the prize from both sides. His fans have included Ursula K Le Guin, Iain Banks, China Miéville and Sarah Jessica Parker, a list that says as much about the breadth of his reach as the book itself. The unresolved question now is not whether the novel deserved a place in the final line-up. It is how long it will take before this win stops being treated as an exception and starts looking like a rule.
