M John Harrison has spent sixty years writing novels that literary fiction pretended not to notice, and science fiction never quite knew what to do with. The Booker Prize for The End of Everything — awarded unanimously on Monday evening — doesn't resolve that tension so much as render it irrelevant. At 81, Harrison is the oldest winner in the award's history, overtaking Margaret Atwood, and the first winner the Booker Foundation describes as emerging from "the bona fide SF world." That phrase is doing a lot of work. It acknowledges the category while insisting this particular book transcends it, which is precisely the kind of institutional hedging Harrison has spent his career arguing against. The End of Everything is set a few decades from now on the Kent coast, years after a disaster no one can properly account for. Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie are surviving alongside the iGhetti: vast, shape-changing entities whose origins and intentions are never explained. At 198 pages — the shortest book on the shortlist — it makes no concessions to comfort. Harrison has described it as "a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend," and the judges took him at his word. Mary Beard, chairing the panel, noted that the unanimous decision came after a full day of discussion, which suggests the work earned its win rather than defaulting to it. The political register is explicit and Harrison is not coy about it. The aliens arrive "as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the gentrification of places like the UK's south-east coast." The collapse of rationality he has in mind is Trumpism and the internet. The "i" in iGhetti, Beard noted, hints at something digital — though you can't be sure, which is the point. This is fiction that uses incomprehension as its primary structural tool, not as a failure of imagination but as an argument about the present moment. When you can't account for the disaster, the old rules stop mattering. Harrison has been making this argument in various forms since the 1960s; the Booker catching up with him in 2025 or 2026 is its own kind of commentary. The win is the first Booker for Serpent's Tail, an imprint of independent publisher Profile Books, on its fifth nomination — a small publisher beating the houses that dominate the prize shortlists. Jarvis Cocker sat on the judging panel alongside Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus, and Rebecca Liu, which is an unusually interesting combination of readers for a prize that sometimes assembles judging panels by institutional gravity rather than genuine taste. That the decision was unanimous, and that Michel Faber's rave review in the Guardian came with the honest caveat that "it won't be for everyone," suggests the book earned its advocates without requiring them to paper over its difficulty. Harrison's career is long and genuinely varied: he ran the books pages of New Worlds through most of the 1970s, took the Boardman Tasker prize for Climbers in 1989, the Arthur C Clarke for Nova Swing in 2007, and the Goldsmiths for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again in 2020. The Booker is the capstone, but it's not correcting an oversight so much as confirming a trajectory that was always there for readers paying attention. His remark on BBC Radio 4 last month — that he had been "working for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic" — lands differently now. The balance has shifted, at least for one evening in London.
