M. John Harrison Wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything

 M. John Harrison Wins Booker Prize for The End of Everything

    Stunning news today in the world of literary fiction!  The End of Everything, M. John Harrison's late career masterpiece, won the Booker Prize!   Harrison is the first ACTUAL genre science fiction author to win (as supposed to writers of literary fiction like Margrate Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro who dabble in science fiction).  This is a capstone of the fairly recent phenomenon of seeing Atwood/Ishiguro type sci-fi influenced titles making it deep into the content.  See, for example, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, which featured several what they call science fiction "elements" in a book that was anything but science fiction.

  After my listen to the Audiobook, I went through Harrison's bibliography to look for hints of this particular kind of weird lit influenced sci fi and came up empty, despite over a half century of continuous publication.  It makes this win even more extraordinary, though I can't help the thought that the Booker committee was not particularly familiar with the work of Jeff VanDerMeer or QNTM.  I think, if you've read the Southern Reach series and There is No Antimetrics Division, Harrison's achievement is less extraordinary, though he ALSO brings a Sebaldian sense of place that both VanDerMeer and QNTM lack.  I'm not saying that the Southern Reach series lacks a sense of place, only that it is not a Sebaldian sense of place.

  Really a stunning result for the issues that concern this blog, specifically the intersection of genre fiction and literary fiction.