Catastrophic Effect: The subversive humanity of the new Booker winner
In this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, English author M John Harrison, 81, was a first-time nominee writing in a genre that doesn’t often take home the coveted prize. Science fiction rarely makes it to the shortlist in the first place. At 198 pages, Harrison’s novel, The End of Everything, was the shortest work in the lineup and perhaps also the most bewildering. Not even Harrison’s fans, and he has many, expected the book to win over favourites like Marlon James’ The Disappearers and other nominees like Elizabeth Strout and Douglas Stuart.
It was then a pleasant surprise when Mary Beard, Chair of Judges for Booker Prize 2026, declared The End of Everything this year’s winner at a ceremony in London on November 9. Harrison, who received the trophy from last year’s Booker Prize winner David Szalay, is the oldest author to have won the prize; the novel has also fetched publisher Serpent’s Tail its first Booker win.
The End of Everything is Harrison’s 13th novel, set in a world confounded by crisis. When the iGhetti, an extraterrestrial species that “seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world” arrive, they change something fundamental about life. Government collapses as does the media and law enforcement, leaving people to fend for themselves. The rest of the world seems to vanish while cities and water bodies fill up with strange creatures and phenomena. Phillip Tennent makes a living in this new normal, a beachcomber near the Channel fishing for artefacts in the water. His 70-year-old aunt Marnie lives in the same town—a painter coping with dementia. “Fragility had set in behind the skin of her cheekbones, but she still made art.” The two, along with others in the town and indeed elsewhere, live through a post-apocalyptic landscape of shifting realities and muddled memories.
The strangeness of their lives becomes more intimate when Philip brings home a shape-shifting entity. It’s an enigmatic, amorphous entity that keeps growing into something human-like — an evolution that is difficult to witness without thinking of AI.
Yet, can one become human only by emulating the biological form of the species or its speech? Harrison leaves the reader to ponder, rather than discover, the answer in a bewildering story. The author himself has described the novel as an “absurdist seaside catastrophe movie”.
The pervasive confusion is deliberate, echoing the lived experience of his characters. In a piece for the Guardian, Harrison wrote that he wanted to capture “a catastrophe the nature of which is impossible to parse, and which continues unabated for the foreseeable future.” A fitting endeavour for an author considered to be one of the foremost stylists of contemporary science fiction.
Born in 1945 in Warwickshire, Harrison’s trysts with the genres began early as he wrote short stories and went on to work as literary editor at New Worlds. The accolades for his bold and bizarre work include the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature for Climbers in 1989. Almost two decades later, his novel Nova Swing won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2007 followed by the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.
The Booker’s prestige value spotlight the literary roots of Harrison’s genre fiction. As Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, who called Harrison as the first bona fide sci-fi Booker Prize winner, says, “The End of Everything is a novel that knows everything about the novel form, and exactly what it’s doing when it breaks it.” This is not a novel that bows in reverence to sci-fi’s time-tested tropes and archetypes. This is a novel that pressure-tests the possibilities of the genre and comes out shining.