Does Mr. John Harrison’s Booker win mean that science fiction is finally being accepted by a “snob” literary establishment? | Mr John Harrison

AAs M John Harrison was announced as the winner of the Booker Prize on Monday evening, the 81-year-old looked stunned. After several decades of career, and long neglected by the dominant literary establishment, he had just won a prize which had never rewarded a writer known for his science fiction, with a resolutely fantastic book.

His fans, including many renowned authors, are delighted. “For decades, it was a standard – and correct – nerd complaint to point out that sentence for sentence, book for book, Harrison was one of the greatest writers, period, but the ‘mainstream’ awards never reflected that,” says China Miéville, who last week won the Goldsmiths Prize with her 1,200-page speculative novel The Rouse. In 2002, Miéville wrote that the fact that Harrison had not won a Booker at that time proved “the bankruptcy and generic snobbery of the literary establishment”. Now he says, “I’m so thrilled, for Harrison and for fiction. »

While some previous Booker-winning authors rely heavily on SF – Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan – Harrison is the first winner from the “real SF” sphere, Gaby Wood, executive director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said Monday. The Pulitzer and Nobel also rarely pay attention to SF, although the latter has honored Ishiguro and Doris Lessing – both of whom are considered literary writers who are interested in SF, rather than purists, and therefore perhaps seen as more acceptable to a wider reading public.

Ishiguro says that when he appeared on the British literary scene, he was “mystified” as to why the establishment had “locked SF into a ghetto”. He believes this did “real damage to the development of ‘literary fiction’ in the UK”, and he “personally only felt free to move in this direction in the early 2000s, after noticing – and envying – the genius of young writers like David Mitchell and Alex Garland who were clearly inspired by SF, comics and games”. He notes, however, that his mentor and teacher Angela Carter had “no such prejudices”, often using elements of SF in her work.

He highlights the contrast between the condescending attitude of the dominant literary establishment and that of cinema: “even the most intellectual critics” revered Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris as “milestones in cinema history”.

Author and critic Olivia Laing acknowledges that it took the literary world “an embarrassingly long time to realize that you don’t need realism to write about what it feels like to live in late capitalism and sort out modernity.” Harrison “finally got what he was owed” with this week’s victory.

Harrison’s winning book, The End of Everything, could be called a novel about polycrisis. He sees mysterious alien phenomena called iGhetti appear on Earth, where they increasingly distort the fabric of reality. Extraterrestrial beings can replace AI, climate breakdown, political chaos, Brexit, capitalism run amok, or all of these at once.

So even though it contains futuristic elements, the book feels very much like a story about the present. “I understand that someone at the awards ceremony asked Harrison if he had ‘any predictions for the future,'” says novelist Michel Faber. “It typifies the stupidity of people who simply don’t understand what the best so-called ‘science fiction’ does.” The End of Everything is resolutely concerned with the present – ​​“an elucidation of the future we already live in,” adds Faber.

This recognition will surely bring Harrison a host of new readers – perhaps even former SF skeptics, for whom the book will prove that the genre can be both literary and politically current. NielsenIQ BookData reported that sales stood at 13,400 copies ahead of the win. Based on previous years, Harrison can expect to sell tens of thousands more copies in the coming months.

Harrison’s victory is a “huge victory for the seriousness of the genre fiction project,” said novelist Julia Armfield, who cried upon hearing the news. But it’s also a victory for the type of fiction that “resists decoding.” Indeed, as Harrison said in an interview with the Guardian this week: “My problem has always been that I don’t believe in gender. He described the book as “SF-adjacent.”

Certain types of writing “make gender concerns seem irrelevant,” says critic and novelist Chris Power. Even in Harrison’s more purely SF books, he subverts the genre, “deconstructing science fiction tropes and questioning science fiction’s militarism.” Since he began writing in the 1960s, he has “always rocked it.”

Harrison is a “writer’s writer before he is a science fiction writer,” recognizes novelist Isabel Waidner. In a commercialized publishing culture “that tends to reward conventions, including arguably arbitrary genre conventions,” Harrison writes fiction “that pushes back against preconceived ideas of what a novel is.” Power suggests that Harrison’s work shows that genre categories can be more useful from a marketing perspective than an aesthetic one. “Many of the most interesting novels have always blurred these things,” he adds.

Novelist Jeff VanderMeer says he tries to avoid the “genre/literary” debate – he finds it “meaningless or, frankly, kind of boring or pointless.” He adds: “What matters to me is when this debate, on one side or the other, reduces complex works of fiction to caricatures. Or when it serves a gatekeeping function that reduces access to prestige or readers that has little to do with the quality of the work.”

Reviewing Harrison’s 2023 “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here, Power described Harrison as “the best British writer you’ve never heard of”. Three years later, the literary establishment woke up and Harrison suddenly became famous, his fans rejoicing in Booker’s brilliance. Waidner puts it this way: “His victory is a victory for literature, for us, and for the thing most threatened: thought. »