John Harrison is considered the first bona fide science fiction author to win the Booker Prize Back in June, our science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson made a bold claim: M. John Harrison’s _The End of Everything_ was not only “the best science-fiction book of the year so far”, but also a “wholly original… work of genius”.
Not only has Emily been proved right, but perhaps she didn’t go quite far enough. This story of an alien invasion won the Booker Prize last night, making it – in the Booker judges’ opinion, at least – not just the best science fiction book of the year so far, but the best novel in any genre of the year. Back in 2009, the great Kim Stanley Robinson – another writer of genius, in my opinion – wrote a piece for _New Scientist_ in which he argued that “three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn’t read”.
With remarkable prescience, Robinson even tipped Harrison’s _Signs of Life_ as one of those books. There has been a long-running reluctance in the literary world to allow science fiction (often abbreviated to SF) into the starry ranks of so-called “literary” fiction. As Harrison himself told the BBC’s _Front Row_ last month, he has “been working for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic… Why shouldn’t a well written SF be considered to be literary fiction?”.
His win is being trumpeted today as the first time a science fiction novel has won the Booker prize. I’d quibble a little with that – how about Margaret Atwood’s _The Testaments_, the sequel to _The Handmaid’s Tale_, set in a dystopian version of the US, which was 2019’s winner? She’d likely quibble with me in return: Atwood has a lot to say about the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction, defining her Gilead stories firmly as the latter.
But this very unwillingness to define a novel as science fiction speaks to that long-running literary snobbery. As the late, great Ursula K. Le Guin put it, reviewing Atwood’s _The Year of the Flood_ back in 2009: “She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.” Whether or not Harrison is the first science fiction author to win the Booker, it’s definitely the case that, as Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood put it in the prize announcement: “Many past Booker Prize authors have borrowed facets of science fiction in their work, but M.
John Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world.” And this means, I hope, that our days of looking down on science fiction are over. Harrison’s brilliant book tells the story of Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber who lives with his grandmother on the Kent coast, in the wake of the invasion of mysterious shapeshifting entities called the iGhetti. It’s “the politics of now seen through the lens of the future”, said the Booker’s chair of judges, Mary Beard – an apt description of all the very best science fiction out there, whether that’s Le Guin’s masterpiece _The Dispossessed_, Octavia Butler’s terrifyingly prescient _Parable of the Sower_, Robinson’s masterpiece _Red Mars_ or Cixin Liu’s own tale of an alien invasion, _The Three-Body Problem_.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
