The Guardian view on M John Harrison’s Booker win: a new frontier for science fiction | Editorial

“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.

Set in an unnamed seaside town in an unspecified future, The End of Everything depicts a disintegrating Britain after the invasion of an alien species called the iGhettis, rumoured to have “come out of the internet”. Capitalism, ecological disaster, AI, Brexit – the cause of “the crisis” is unclear. All we know is that “it’s ongoing and unresolved. It never ends.”

Ahead of Cop31, Ed Miliband this week claimed that “the scenarios once of science fiction are now regular occurrences”. With news of Microsoft outages, cyber-attacks on supermarket freezers, not to mention national stockpiling, the Booker judges’ decision couldn’t be more timely. As Atwood has said, science fiction is “always about now”.

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s Robot series to Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (a new film adaptation of which has been panned by critics), writers have been fascinated by non-human intelligence. Science fiction responds to anxieties about the impact of scientific and technological discoveries on society and the human psyche. Harrison’s great hero, JG Ballard, described his move away from classic sci-fi as a rejection of outer space for “inner space”.

Harrison has dismissed science fiction’s world-building as “the great clomping foot of nerdism”. The End of Everything is about a world breaking down, and as rationality and communication have collapsed, he had to break down the rules of fiction, including science fiction. There are no explanations or solutions, no salvation. He wants the reader to feel as confused and destabilised as his characters.

For some, this lack of answers is bewildering, and will confirm the Booker’s reputation for tricky winners. Others have an alien aversion that no amount of fine writing can overcome. The Wasp Factory author, Iain Banks, published his science fiction novels under the name Iain M Banks to distinguish them from his mainstream work. This is no longer necessary.

Whether the novel’s win marks a new frontier for publishing and literary awards remains to be seen. One thing is certain – there will be no shortage of fiction confronting a bleakly precarious future. As Harrison has said, we are living “in an age of fantasy”. The End of Everything is a novel for our times. Today’s polycrisis demands a polyphony of genres. Be it speculative fiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy, satire, dystopia - or a mix – the question of whether such fiction deserves a capital L belongs to a bygone age.