M John Harrison won the Booker Prize for fiction for The End of Everything, and science fiction has its first winner in the prize's 58-year history. At 81, he also became the oldest author to take the Booker prize for fiction.
That puts a genre once treated as a side road inside the main lane of literary recognition. Harrison's 13th novel won after around 15 years in the making, a long gestation that fits a book built to resist neat classification.
The End of Everything and Booker
Harrison said, “It’s interesting that something that has an SF-adjacent feel can be regarded as a serious book and given the Booker prize.” He added, “My problem has always been that I don’t believe in genre. I don’t believe in it in any way.”
That friction sits at the center of the win. The book has been presented as a science fiction novel and also described by Harrison as a mix of gothic horror, road movie, science fiction and fantasy, which helps explain why it could move through a prize often associated with tighter literary boundaries.
81 years old, 13th novel
Harrison was 80 when he decided to “push it over the cliff one more time,” and he has said of the book, “My rule has always been push it as far as it will go, then move back slightly from the edge.” The result is a novel that won at an age when many writers have already been folded into retrospective recognition rather than fresh prize contention.
He has also said, “It would be ordinary sci-fi if you were told it was the triffids.” The line points to the book's refusal to behave like a simple genre exercise, even as the Booker result makes the science fiction label impossible to ignore.
AI, Brexit and collapse
The End of Everything takes in AI, late capitalism, environmental collapse, the refugee crisis and Brexit, and Harrison described it as “a book designed to present the explanatory collapse and epistemological collapse that you see in societies that have suddenly lost their grounding.” Set in an unnamed coastal town somewhere in Kent, it also asks what happens when non-human intelligence takes over.
He had already won the Goldsmiths prize in 2020 for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and he served as a Booker judge in 2022. This win pushes his work from cult recognition into the prize's central record, with the unanswered question now sitting on the judges rather than the author: how they drew the line between science fiction and the literary field it has finally entered.
