M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize | Hacker News Reader

M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize

theguardian.com

56 pointssorokod37 comments

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241835818/reviews

Wow, pretty divisive, reviews are all over the place. I haven't read it yet, but the reviews seem to tend towards people annoyed at abstract and flowery plot / writing?

I will have to try, but I've also struggled through (possibly) similar books like Gnomon by the British sci-fi author Nick Harkaway which had plots too abstract to properly hold my attention but were well liked by others. Similar but opposite, How to Win the Time War, which was so abstract the whole book was a metaphor, stayed together enough that I followed the plot and enjoyed it (though it was quite short).

Curious how other people here found this book?

I am tempted to try this one just because it has won a major award, and I'm a huge sci fi reader.

However, I suspect I will be one of the one star or DNF reviewers - I haven't enjoyed any of the other M John Harrison books I tried. The ideas are usually interesting but the execution tends towards weirdness and not much plot. Great at creating atmosphere but not so good at holding my attention. Maybe I will give it a go...

> I haven't enjoyed any of the other M John Harrison books I tried

100% this.

I like the man and he's a great public speaker. I do not get on with his novels at all, from In Viriconium to a few decades later when everyone loved Light so I gave his "SF" another try.

I read a good bit of Light, I had the sense that it was probably very clever but just not for me. Too gloomy, with unlikeable characters.

I also began to suspect it was more magical realism than science fiction. Maybe incorrectly, but made me lose interest.

Can you list some of the recent good sci-fis please? I haven't read any new after Salvation series by P. Hamilton

Klara and the sun was really good, though I heard the movie not so good.

Also anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The one that stood out from him was the Void series and Alien Clay. Of course I'd you haven't read him do start with his main series as it was excellent too, but I'm pretty sure before 2020

As a general rule I usually find scifi books that win awards outside the genere but aren't recognized inside the genere to be pretty bad.

I have read The End of Everything and other M. John Harrison books, both conventional rock-climbing memoir and way out space opera.

IMHO if you like Harrison's prose and the atmosphere, keep going. Even if the plot is hard to make out. IHMO, If you are reading M. John Harrison for the plot, then you're in the wrong book.

I can see how some would be bored or baffled by this book, or even dislike it intensely. If you didn't like his other books, then this one is more in that vein, and in some ways more so. If so, you probably won't enjoy this one either.

He has said "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then ask what it's afraid of" (1) He is deconstructing, not constructing, stories.

The End of Everything has an anti-plot, is set in anti-places and contains at least character that is anti-person.

If it's not for you then that's perfectly OK. I don't pretend to understand why it won an award, but I liked it. Probably. It's hard to be sure. And that's something out of the ordinary.

There are though, themes or images that are of a particular time and place (2026, South coast of England). Most notably Boats taking people across the Channel to some-place uncertain but "not here". If you are somewhere else then that image might not mean anything to you, but the resonance with current UK political discourse must be deliberate. And it helps to "get" it.

In the same way that his last book The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) was about the fallout, the curdled nostalgia and communication failures of the post-Brexit moment. (2) Maybe. If it's "about" anything other than aquatic humanoids, dodgy jobs and fairy tales, IDK.

1) https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jul/20/m-john-harri...

2) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/19/the-sunken-lan...

> I don't pretend to understand why it won an award,

By Mary's Beard !!

More correctly, by Mary's vote: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/22/i-read-163-nov...

I'd say it's a deserved winner. I'm not usually someone who reads many booker prize nominees but I happened to have read I think at least 6/7 of the long list and I would say flowery plot and writing is common to getting nominated so I can't complain about that. John of John being far worse for this. I possibly if I had to pick my favourite I would have gone Helen of Nowhere or Switzy but that's simply I'm often very drawn into the type of story Fitzcarraldo publish, (Switzy not being Fitzcarraldo but of a similar vibe).

I think the key for me is sci fi being recoqnised as an important category in media creation. It's a genre that doesn't often get the big awards despite in my view often having some of the best character development and emotional and moral plot lines. Obviously TNG with the late great Patrick Stewart being a huge cultural influence for those reasons.

Haven't heard the term "abstract" applied to a plot, unless you mean highly metaphorical? Genuinely curious in case it's something I'd like. What's an example, without giving too much away?

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway has a plot that is intricate and highly metaphorical. Read it for the intellectual plot.

Examples: have you read any Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino?

M. John Harrison deconstructs plot. If you try to read him just for the plot, you will be bored or baffled.

So if we are talking scifi, is it comparable to dhalgren?

I suppose you could compare M. John Harrison's work to Dhalgren in terms of plot / absence of. But not subject matter or prose style.

Disclosure, I Did Not Finish Dhalgren: The prose style and subject matter did nothing for me. I have never DNF a M. John Harrison book.

Public reviews are not all over the place -- they are remarkably bad.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Everything-M-John-Harrison-ebook/...

Ever since Amazon.com allowed blank feedback alongside proper reviews, there's been inflation in every book's rating, with most books clustering around 4.2 - 4.6 Stars.

These days, a 4.0 on Amazon means that a book is questionable, divisive, or has editorial errors. A 3.8 has serious issues.

I believe this is because Amazon prompts you for a review/rating after you've finished the book -- if you read on a Kindle, you only get the prompt when the book is at 100% complete -- so those who do not finish a book seem not to rate.

I don't think I've ever seen anything with a 3.1-star rating across >100 reviews. This suggests that the book is exceptionally bad -- that people were motivated to leave poor reviews.

By all accounts it's a very vague story...

Wow 2.8 stars. Goodread ratings are pretty BS generally speaking, but i'm not sure i've ever seen a book that low.

Not to mention, if you click on show 5 star reviews, it shows the first 10, 3 of which have disclosures about receiving compensation, which seems like a pretty high ratio to me, but i dont know what is normal.

To borrow a phrase from Rick and Morty: "Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."

That is, I've seen plenty of very high ratings on Goodreads/Amazon for things that (in my opinion) range from mediocre to slop.

That tells me there are lots of raters who use some criteria that, while I'm sure it's reasonable to them, doesn't correlate well with anything I'd recognize as "quality".

Glancing at the actual text of the Goodreads reviews, it seems like most of the negative ones are outright saying that they didn't understand the book, and therefore decided that it's meaningless. I'm not saying this because I'm trying to sneer at those reviewers, it's just quite literally what they're saying about the book.

Okay, but I've never seen a book with such poor public reviews. I'm dead serious about this: I've never seen anything comparable. And I spend a lot of time buying and reading science fiction books. The public disdain for this book is quite remarkable, really.

So there are a lot of boos. And even the book's supporters seem to strain to find meaning in it. The most parsimonious explanation is that it's genuinely incoherent.

Gnomon might be my favorite book ever. It’s one of those books where the first time through it’s disjointed and almost seems like a collection of novellas, then the second read you see the connections from the beginning and it all makes sense, and reads 3+ reward with really deep semiotics and structural parallels that I can only describe as fractal.

So Harrison aside, if you find yourself without reading material at some point, I’d really encourage giving it another try. It’s certainly abstract, but there is incredible depth and coherence throughout.

a tangent, he is John le Carré's son.

Congratulations -- and, it should have happened so, so much more sooner. (It's interesting to think about how Harrison pierced the veil between "genre" and "general literary fiction": he won the Goldsmiths prize in 2020, and judged the Bookers in 2022. His individual recognition as an author was a process.)

Feel like Ishiguro got close, with Never Let Me Go making the shortlist and Klara and the Sun making the longlist, but neither of those feel like they had the gravitas to win it.

Curious what books you think should've potentially clinched it?

Right, "Never Let Me Go" was disappointing to me as SF because it wasn't very interested in how this can possibly work, the focus was on the emotional impact. I'm not made of stone, I cry every time I re-read the last few pages of "Incandescence", but for me it hits harder if I'm not wondering whether any of this makes any sense.

Ishiguro clearly doesn't care about that, which is fine, and I made peace with it, but as a result I'd actually be disappointed if somehow "Never Let Me Go" had won the Booker.

> Harrison pierced the veil between "genre" and "general literary fiction"

Indeed, as did the much-missed Iain Banks. The Guardian's headline is tiresomely reductive, although of course that's no more than one expects from the press. I would suggest that Harrison's two best-known books are The Course of the Heart and Climbers, both of which fall squarely into the category of "general literary fiction".

I read The Course of the Heart because I'd heard it was sci/fi lit, it helped that I was enjoying a bit of a gnostic/occult kick at the time, and an author I hold in high esteem considers it one of the greatest works of fiction ever produced.

But I found it provincially little britain and too obviously desperately trying to be literary that I was confused by the praise, I don't think I'll read another Harrison, but I'm glad he's won the Booker, not that it carries the same weight any more.

I only read his book "Climbers" which I thought was really good, non-linear and vague but atmospheric. I am a climber or at least know the world of climbing and M John is also a climber.

I'm tempted to read his other books but as mentioned the reviews are quite divisive. Climbers took me back to when I first read Iain Banks books, that is the kind of vibe I was getting.

This really cheered up my morning.

Mike Harrison is very much not the first Booker-prize winner I have read by a long long chalk. I was reading Booker nominees during my English Literative 'A' level in the early 1980s.

But he's the first I've been to sci-fi conventions with, met, heard speak, probably had a beer with...

Congrats, Mike!

> first science fiction author to win the Booker prize

This feels like we're really splitting hairs in order to exclude Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (the 2024 winner) from the category of science fiction.

I haven't read the novel, but going by the Wikipedia article you could argue that just because it features astronauts on the ISS doesn't yet make it science fiction - as long as nothing unusual happens to the astronauts, what goes on on the ISS is no more science fiction than what an airline pilot does in their day-to-day job.

Even the author seems to agree (also from Wikipedia): "In an interview, Harvey stated that her goal was to write the novel as a "space pastoral", focusing on realism and the beauty of space rather than the speculative nature of science fiction."

Yeah, the key distinguisher for "Science Fiction" is that it asks a "What if?" question. Some SF authors (e.g. Margaret Atwood) don't like that because they're writing novels with no robots or spaceships, but too bad, you don't get to choose how other people experience your work.

But that then begs the question… isn’t Margaret Atwood already the first SF author to win the Booker Prize? Making Harrison second?

That's a good point.

Margaret Atwood did not win the Booker Prize for Oryx and Crake and sequels, the "arguably SF" ones mentioned above, but for other novels. IDK if "The Testaments" qualifies though.

This might make MJH the first Sci-Fi author to win a Booker prize for a Sci-Fi novel.

It doesn't beg the question, "begging the question" is a type of fallacy in which we insist upon presuming X and then rely on that to prove X which is a waste of everybody's time. But yes, it is reasonable if we notice that Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" is Science Fiction to expect that awarding a Booker to its sequel "The Testaments" would constitute a Booker for Science Fiction.

I would imagine the distinction attempted here is that despite writing those novels, Atwood doesn't consider herself to be an SF author, perhaps Harrison says he is an SF author. Atwood also won for "The Blind Assassin" which very much is not Science Fiction, it's historical fiction, it's not history but all the stuff happening in the background was real.

This shades over somewhere. If your story features an England ruled by literal Nazis it's Science Fiction (alternate history is a type of SF, "What if the Nazis won?" is a fairly popular theme) but if your England just has some Nazi sympathizers and your story is set in the 1930s it might just be historical fiction.

For Oryx and Crake and sequels, it's hard to argue that "a novel with no robots or spaceships ... but a whole lot of genetic engineering" isn't actually SF.

It doesn't pass the test that e.g. a novel set on the actually existing International Space Station does. It does contain a core fictional scientific "what-if" extrapolation.

I respect the author's opinion here and I hold a different opinion, for that reason.

When you read Orbital, you very much get the feeling that it is squarely planting itself in the territory of "exploring right now in a literary way" rather than being sci-fi. I think it has a strong vibe of really not wanting to be considered sci-fi. That what makes it an interesting book

I tried to read it but it's very hard to get into and I've read the road by Mccarthy

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