‘We’re walking in dreams into a hopeless situation’: the Booker Prize winner on his sci-fi alien invasion wake-up call | Science fiction books

WWith his twinkling eyes and silver ponytail, Mr. John Harrison looks nothing like his 81 years. The M stands for Michael, Mike for his friends. And last night he became the oldest author to win the Booker Prize for fiction, for his 13th novel, The End of Everything. Our interview is delayed due to wifi issues, which is entirely appropriate given that the novel is, among other things, about what happens when non-human intelligence takes over.

The End of Everything is the first science fiction novel to win the award in its 58-year history, almost as long as Harrison has been writing. “It’s interesting,” he says when asked if he feels vindicated, “that something that has a sci-fi side can be considered a serious book and win the Booker Prize. My problem has always been that I don’t believe in the genre. I don’t believe in it in any way.” He gently waves his finger at me. It’s a bit like having coffee with a perkier, bearded Gandalf – it won’t surprise anyone that, as a youth, Harrison read The Lord of the Rings every year for a decade.

Whether he likes it or not, Harrison is hailed as a titan of literary science fiction. Her fans include giants such as the late Ursula K Le Guin and Iain Banks, as well as China Miéville today and, more surprisingly, Sex and the City star and last year’s Booker judge, Sarah Jessica Parker. But he is not, as he would be the first to say, a household name. Although that has changed. In 2020 he won the Goldsmiths Prize for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and in 2022 he was a Booker judge himself.

It took him about 15 years to write The End of Everything, as real-world events overtook him. AI, late capitalism, environmental collapse, the refugee crisis, Brexit – almost every manifestation of the current omni-crisis can be found in the pages of this slim and elusive novel. As its title suggests, it is the work of our end times. “I suddenly thought, ‘Well, you’re 80 years old, you might as well try to push him over the cliff one more time.’ My rule has always been to push it as far as it will go, then move slightly away from the edge. But this time I was like, “Let’s go ahead and see what happens.” »

And what is happening is an enigma. As critics have pointed out, The End of Everything deliberately resists definition. It is a triumph of obfuscation. “I could explain some of it to you,” the author said tantalizingly. “But no, I don’t want to.” For Harrison, the world ends not with a bang, but with endless confusion. “It was a book designed to present the explanatory collapse and epistemological collapse that we see in societies that have suddenly lost their foundations.”

He describes it as a mix of gothic horror, road movie, science fiction and fantasy – even a “seaside novel”. I would add satire to the list. This is not a dystopia, Harrison clearly knows that, but rather a post-disaster novel in the tradition of early JG Ballard or John Wyndham. But he wanted to play with conventions; he didn’t want the reader to know more than the characters. “It would be ordinary science fiction,” he said, “if we told you it was the triffids. »

Set in an unnamed coastal town somewhere in Kent (“If this is Hell, it looks a lot like Margate”, as Peaky Blinders put it) in the near future, The End of Everything depicts a Britain in disintegration, after an invasion by an alien species called the iGhettis, who appear as “great writhing shards of light”. The iGhettis are a play on “I get it” (explanation), “I get stuff” (capitalism), Getty (extreme wealth), Apple (technology), Me (Freud). “I wrote it and thought, ‘This is cheap.’ And then I looked at it again and thought, “Oh my God, there’s so much ambiguity in that one word,” he said happily.

The germ of the novel was the financial crisis of 2007-2008. “I was angry, but I couldn’t make it work.” So he put what he had written in a drawer and “cannibalized” it in 2015 for a short story called The Crisis. It was almost the end for him. While reading the story at an event in east London, he was struck by what felt like the worst indigestion of his life. “I thought, ‘That’ll teach you to drink two glasses of red wine and eat pizza before you play.’ » Two days later, he was taken to the hospital and told he had had a heart attack. He was just under 70 years old. When he returned to The Crisis, he realized it was the template for an entire novel. “I was like, ‘Wow! And I started working on it.

Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945. The proximity of the Second World War overshadowed his childhood. “You were never allowed to forget him.” His father was an engineer and the family lived on an estate of modern houses built for post-war prime workers. One of the defining memories of his childhood was a Narnia-style cabinet that, when he climbed into it, “was a library of trash novels,” from 1920s thrillers to contemporary science fiction magazines.

“It was full of all the things you weren’t supposed to enjoy,” he says delightedly. He doesn’t know who these books belonged to. His parents had a very small library with a few classics downstairs in the living room. “But it was the most extraordinary education for the imagination. His father died when he was 13 and his mother never got over his death, something Harrison will explore if he ever writes his autobiography.

At the age of 21, he published his first short story in the science fiction magazine Science Fantasy. He became literary editor of Nouveaux Mondes in 1968. He held many odd jobs: groom in a hunting stable, clerk, trainee teacher. “Being kind of a hippie, I decided that if you wrote, you would just write and suffer the consequences,” he says. This meant couch surfing and often not having much to eat. “We all lived in appalling circumstances in west London before west London became west London,” he says of his fellow writers. “And it was a lot of fun.”

Today he lives in rural Shropshire with his partner, editor and writer Cath Phillips. He wrote his first drafts in Moleskine notebooks, “always black and with squared paper” using Muji 0.5 pens, red and black. He is already working on an idea that could result in a novel or short stories.

“Since my beginnings in 1965,” he says, “my ambition has been to break down the divisions between genders. This has been a common thread.” As a critic for many years, he asked, “Why should we be bad writers just because we write science fiction? Why can’t we write good characters? Why shouldn’t we go all out?”

He’s no longer angry at the publishing industry. “I mellowed as I got older,” he says. He is now in his “advanced stage,” as he calls it. “Older writers get gnarly and knotty. They just want to do what they want to do.” And it worked. “I sold more books because of this position than because of compromises with the industry.” And now he’s won his biggest prize.

The novel ends on what he calls “a high note” rather than a hopeful one. Does he have hope for humanity? “No, I have no hope,” he replies bluntly. “We are walking in a dream towards a hopeless situation. Somehow, someone must remind us that every action has consequences and we ignore them.”

Is this the responsibility of the novelist? “There are a lot of them,” he said. “To charm, to entertain. But I’ve always been Cassandra. It’s always a warning. ‘Be careful what you do.'”