This year’s Booker Prize winner, a dystopian satire by an 81-year-old veteran of the British sci-fi scene, has been described as a breakthrough. The book is a potent rendering of our time’s crisis, but the reader is left with a catastrophe whose cause we can never quite know.
On 9 November, M. John Harrison was awarded the 2026 Booker Prize and its £50k for The End of Everything (his 13th novel). At 81, he is the oldest winner in the prize’s history. The judges (chairing Mary Beard) were unanimous in their decision. The Booker Prize Foundation described the award as historic, with its CEO noting that Harrison was the first winner to come out of the ‘bona fide SF world’.
The response has been absolutely ecstatic. The press have been all over the place, highlighting just how much the novel’s sense of apocalypse and doom mirrors our current anxieties. That’s not in any doubt. The more pertinent question is what the novel and the literary establishment that have anointed it actually do with those anxieties. Does it give us any insight into the forces pushing society toward disaster? Or does it merely present those forces as mysterious and intractable, beyond human understanding? Harrison is a very good and serious writer, and the award is in no way unexpected in literary terms. The way the award has been celebrated in relation to The End of Everything, however, tells us something about the prevailing attitude of the cultural establishment that hands out these awards.
A beachcomber on a ruined coast
The End of Everything is set in near-future England where the social order has been completely upended by some unspecified crisis. The state is effectively non-existent, Europe is out of sight, and the iGhetti (mysterious entities) are now involved in human affairs. At the heart of it all is Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber living on the coast with his elderly artist aunt Marnie. He makes a living picking up the oddities that turn up from the Channel. His discovery of a thing that is changing, that is in fact a living thing, and that starts to speak, is what sets the novel in motion. It’s something that grows and, in the end, completely undermines the characters’ belief that the world around them can be understood rationally.
Harrison’s setting is eastern and southeast England, from Hastings down to the Thames and into Suffolk. More significantly, he said the themes and satire came from ‘current affairs’. The official Booker description captures the essence of his central inquiry: what happens when the very fabric of the established order and the explanations we have for the world are in a state of ‘ongoing disaster’, and yet we have to go on living in it?
The link to contemporary Britain is very obvious. You’ve got a man literally trawling through the wreckage of a world he doesn’t really understand, looking for things to sell. That’s a potent image of life in a society which is in a state of insecurity and decline. That’s where the book’s real subject starts to emerge. Harrison has also pointed to the 2008 financial crisis as the novel’s genesis. That’s significant. The book isn’t simply the product of some eternal fascination with the end of the world. Its creative origins are in one of the most pivotal convulsions of contemporary capitalism.
Catastrophe without causes
The 2008 crisis was the catalyst, but Harrison’s imagined method goes far beyond that. The crisis wasn’t a natural disaster or an alien invasion. It was the outcome of specific economic and social relations: the enormous expansion of financial speculation, the huge build-up of private wealth and private debt and a social order in which the economy is subordinated to the imperative of profit. The austerity then imposed on working people was, of course, also the product of political decisions and class interests.
In The End of Everything, the catastrophe is, in fact, very opaque. The Booker Foundation describes it as an adventure “into the very limits of human understanding” and the nature of the crisis is deliberately obscure. The characters are in no position to really understand what is going on around them. That obscurity is absolutely central to Harrison’s conception of the book. Mary Beard told the press that it’s a story of a society “going through a catastrophe which they don’t really understand”. Even more telling in terms of Harrison’s view of the book, she said the point was that “when the catastrophe comes you won’t know what’s happening”.
Here is the book’s central problem: what starts off as a reaction to the breakdown of historical relations becomes a meditation on the impossibility of ever really understanding that breakdown. Historical relations (with their causes, their beneficiaries and their opponents) become an overwhelming, incomprehensible force which simply crushes the individual. That’s not something particular to Harrison. It’s a commonplace in contemporary literature and film. Ecological collapse, pandemic, technological disruption, war and social disintegration all come back as fate, as an inexplicable eruption, as the inevitable outcome of humanity’s supposed universal tendency to bring about disaster. It’s far rarer for them to be presented as the product of historically developed social relations, which could therefore be understood and changed.
Some people have actually suggested that the iGhetti is AI. Others have suggested it’s a commentary on capitalism, others on Brexit or climate change. Harrison himself is very deliberately non-committal on the matter. If we take the AI interpretation, that highlights the point. AI isn’t some autonomous intelligence that just turns up on an English beach. It’s a technology developed within a particular economic system and overwhelmingly held by big corporations and states. The real questions then aren’t so much what AI might become as who owns and controls it, how it’s used and what social interests it serves.
Turning technology into an enigmatic guest whose ultimate purpose is utterly incomprehensible risks reproducing exactly the ideological veneer it needs to get through. Satire needs more than atmosphere; it needs an object. Harrison’s objects are often rather obscure: the natural human desire for explanation, the persistence of the normal in the face of disaster, commercial opportunism and the sheer absurdity of trying to apply the familiar categories to a situation that has been utterly transformed. Those are all legitimate and potentially very rich objects of satire. The social relations which produce the catastrophe, however, tend to get lost behind them.
From the New Wave to the prize ceremony
Harrison’s career absolutely merits serious attention precisely because The End of Everything didn’t just appear out of the blue. It grew out of the very atmosphere of the New Worlds period, the seminal British SF magazine of the day (the one linked to Michael Moorcock). Harrison was at the heart of the British New Wave, and he was part of the movement that sought to shake up the genre and its inherited assumptions. His subsequent work (the Viriconium books, Light, Nova Swing, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, etc.) developed a particular prose style and a pronounced scepticism about any kind of neat explanation. The Booker material makes it clear he was never going to be comfortably pigeonholed. That scepticism was once genuinely subversive. It rejected the technocratic fantasy of mastery as much as it rejected the comfortable assumptions of much traditional genre fiction. His refusal to construct a fully and neatly rationalised universe assailed complacency.
But of course this aesthetic has its other side. As the political radicalism of the 1960s faded out in the 1970s and 1980s, so did a large section of the intellectual and artistic world move away from the attempt to understand society as a historical totality. The scepticism about false certainty gave way to scepticism about the very possibility of objective historical knowledge. Postmodernism provided the theoretical language for this withdrawal, with its scepticism about ‘grand narratives’ (Marxism and the various socialist narratives of historical development being the most obvious).
Harrison cannot simply be reduced to this tendency. His writing is too individual, and his intellectual formation too complex, for such a crude identification. But The End of Everything shares something of this wider historical path: what begins as hostility towards simplistic explanations ends perilously close to treating explanation itself as impossible. At the post-award press conference, Harrison celebrated the erosion of genre limits. He argued that the epoch of genres understood as “fences and boxes, pigeonholes” was ending, and that a contemporary novel could combine several genres simultaneously. Much is to be welcomed in the destruction of snobbish barriers between “literary” and genre fiction. However, formal hybridity is not in itself an artistic breakthrough. A novel may contain a thriller, mystery, satire, dystopia, road novel and realism simultaneously and still evade the most important questions raised by its subject. The decisive issue in art is not how many forms a work can combine, but how deeply and truthfully it penetrates reality.
Sugar, venture capital and “dynamite”
The Booker Prize has never existed in a vacuum. It’s a product of history and society. Literary prizes don’t just drop down from the sky to pass some kind of value-free judgement. They are institutions in their own right, products of a particular economic and intellectual milieu. That makes Harrison’s reception so fascinating. After all those decades on the periphery of British speculative fiction, he’s finally been welcomed into one of the country’s most august literary institutions. That is, of course, a reflection of his actual achievements, but it’s also a sign of the death of the old divide between ‘serious literature and science fiction.
Yet the Booker set are very much in sympathy with The End of Everything’s vision of apocalypse. It’s a world in which the normal structures have all gone to hell, the future is terrifying, and nobody has the foggiest idea what’s actually happened. Mary Beard put it quite clearly as ‘the politics of now seen through the lens of the future’.
But what about politics? Contemporary official culture is absolutely fluent in the language of catastrophe. Catastrophe is in fact one of its key moods. Climate collapse, authoritarianism, technological dislocation, pandemics, war and the prospect of total societal breakdown are all part of the contemporary cultural landscape. What is largely absent from this is the notion that these disparate crises have identifiable social roots and that working people can consciously shape history.
The cultural establishment can therefore fully embrace the image of apocalypse so long as the apocalypse is in some way ambiguous, existential or intractable. It can be disturbing, it can be grotesque, it can be surreal, it can be ironic and it can be utterly radical in its aesthetic. The only thing it absolutely cannot be is a politically transparent apocalypse. In that respect Harrison’s novel is absolutely the book of its moment.
A “twinge of optimism”?
In announcing the judges’ decision Mary Beard did say that the book, in spite of its very dark subject matter, leaves you with a ‘twinge of optimism’. Harrison has been considerably more cautious on the subject. When asked what he hoped readers would take from the novel he described the world of the book as very grim and very likely to stay that way. The most you could possibly say at the end of the day is that there might be a kind of ‘relief’ rather than any hope or sense of closure.
The point is rather telling, really. What survives the end of everything in The End of Everything is the sheer persistence of human relationships and the sheer fact of people trying to go on when the inherited explanations are no longer going to cut it. That should not be ignored. Human solidarity in the face of social collapse is a valid subject for an artist, and Harrison’s emphasis on the persistence of the ordinary amid all that is going on is clearly one of the book’s major strengths.
But such solidarity remains fundamentally private and defensive. People “muddle through” as Beard puts it. They’re just trying to get on with the business of living in the face of immense forces utterly beyond comprehension. Muddling through is not the same as historical agency and that’s precisely where a materialist criticism has to go further than both Harrison and his Booker contemporaries. The crisis of our time has produced confusion, fear and reaction. It has also produced opposition. Workers, youth and other sections of the population have not simply been the passive victims of history. They have on numerous occasions attempted to resist the worsening of their living conditions, the effects of austerity, inequality, the rise of authoritarianism and war.
What’s missing from so much of the contemporary dystopian art is not necessarily an ounce of optimism (in the sentimental sense) but agency. Harrison’s novel is very attuned to the experience of social disintegration. What it can’t really convey is the sheer weight of the social force which could in fact overcome it. That’s probably why the book has been so warmly received. You can be absolutely convinced that civilisation is in crisis and yet remain profoundly pessimistic about humanity’s capacity to rebuild it on its own. That mixture of deep anxiety and political paralysis is in fact the hallmark of much of the contemporary bourgeois cultural life.
The End of Everything is in fact more interesting than either unqualified triumph or wholesale rejection would suggest. Its strengths point to a contradiction. Harrison is absolutely right to see something real in the picture: the social landscape in a state of exhaustion, the erosion of the old assumptions, the odd persistence of the everyday in the face of disaster, and the experience of the individual who increasingly feels the forces of economic, technological and political change as something which is simply happening to them from outside. The beachcomber trawling through the wreckage is an image which has real social resonance.
But art has to go beyond the surface of things. The fundamental flaw in Harrison’s conception is that the mystification his characters go through might well become the very principle that organises the work. Their sense of being mystified by the forces that shape their lives becomes the very assertion that those forces are in fact unknowable. That’s a very different route from the Marxist conception of art and history. Capitalist society is mysterious precisely because the relations between people take the form of relations between commodities, markets, corporations and all the various autonomous technological forces. The point is not to fetishise that mystery; it’s to get through it.
The difference is absolutely decisive. “We don’t understand what is going on” is a perfectly legitimate starting point for serious art. “What is going on cannot be understood” is a different proposition and one which can easily become an excuse for helplessness. The End of Everything is intelligent, disturbing and clearly takes the bewildered state of life in a society whose institutions and assumptions are clearly on the way out very seriously. Its refusal to offer any easy consolation is a real strength. Harrison’s achievement absolutely merits serious attention rather than being ignored simply because of the acclaim it has received.
But its dominant conception fits perfectly with the view of a cultural establishment that sees catastrophe in every direction and yet sees no social force capable of surmounting it. What we need is not an artificially optimistic literature, still less a literature of political propaganda in the form of novels. Art has its own laws and will reveal truths which are beyond the reach of slogans. The greatest art is art which sees beneath the immediate surface the deeper movement of human relationships and of historical life.
The real challenge facing contemporary literature is therefore bigger than just imagining the end of the world. It’s about making the utterly incomprehensible comprehensible, uncovering the human relations beneath apparently autonomous forces, and restoring the human being to history as more than a frightened spectator of their own destruction. The task of coming to terms with “the end of everything” is inextricably linked to the task of preventing it.
Bibliography
Primary text and works by Harrison
Harrison, M. John. The End of Everything. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2026.
Harrison, M. John. Light. London: Gollancz, 2002.
Harrison, M. John. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. London: Gollancz, 2020.
Harrison, M. John. Viriconium. London: Gollancz, 2000.
Contemporary sources
The Booker Prizes. “Everything you need to know about The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” 9 November 2026. [thebookerprizes.com]
The Booker Prizes. “The End of Everything: Winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” [thebookerprizes.com]
Loffhagen, Emma. “M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]
Jordan, Justine. “M John Harrison’s Booker prize-winner is weird, challenging and strikingly topical.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]
Story, Hannah. “M John Harrison wins 2026 Booker Prize for dystopian novel The End of Everything.” ABC News, 10 November 2026. [abc.net.au]
Criticism and theory
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.
North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2015.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. 1924. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
