For the first time in its history, the Booker Prize has gone to a science fiction novel. The award was given to M. John Harrison for The End of Everything, a book that marks a turning point for a genre that has long struggled to win acceptance from the literary establishment.
The novel centres on an alien invasion and a cast of shapeshifting entities known as iGhetti. Its protagonist, Phillip Tennent, is a beachcomber working along the Kent coast in England. Mary Beard, chair of the Booker judges, praised the book for its focus on the politics of the present, saying its speculative premise speaks directly to the concerns of today.
The win is significant partly because of how the Booker has treated speculative writing in the past. Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, which took the prize in 2019, is a dystopian novel, though Atwood has described her own work as speculative fiction rather than science fiction. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, has noted that many past winners drew on science fiction elements, even if they were not classified that way.
Harrison has spent decades working to bring science fiction closer to mainstream literary respect. Writer Kim Stanley Robinson, in a 2009 essay, argued that the genre deserved more recognition from the Booker, and he singled out Harrison's Signs of Life as a book that merited attention. Ursula K. Le Guin had earlier criticised the habit of confining genre writers to a separate literary ghetto.
Whether Harrison's win will end the long-running debate over literary snobbery toward science fiction remains an open question. The prize puts the genre in a new position, but the stigma that Le Guin, Robinson and others have challenged for years has not yet been settled.
Credit. Based on reporting by Alison Flood for New Scientist. Is this your work? Write to us.
13
