(www.theguardian.com)
I was on holiday, and stopped at a second hand bookshop to grab something hopefully a bit trashy to read. I picked up Nova Switch because the cover made it look like some weird sci-fi detective romp. But after about three pages it became apparent that I had happened upon something very special indeed, and when I made it to the end I did something that I'd never done before. I turned back to page one and read the entire thing again.
It is magnificent. Everyone should read it. It turned out to be the second book in a trilogy, and maybe that was part of its appeal. It didn't explain anything, it just launched into a beautiful and strange sci fi world, filled it with extraordinary characters, and moved languidly through the story.
So much science fiction is just dreadful garbage. Harrison is most definitely not.
The Death Sentence episode on Light is a very good discussion and introduction to Harrison and his work. https://soundcloud.com/death-sentence-pod/m-john-harrison-li... (start from 55 minutes in if you want to skip some three-year-old-news and obligatory death metal interlude)
Thanks for the warning!
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.
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!
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?
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...
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 also began to suspect it was more magical realism than science fiction. Maybe incorrectly, but made me lose interest.
Also, the stuff that has won awards inside the genre these past ~10 years has been generally quite poor.
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
Assuming you're talking Children of Whatever, eh, I'm not sure I agree. IMO some of his other novels are _far_ better (Children of Whatever are _good_, but some of the other stuff is _great_.)
Elder Race and Dogs of War are also awesome entry points for people who enjoy S&S fantasy and military themes, respectively.
Also, "There is no anti-memetics division" is interesting but I'm divided about it. The first 60-70% is great, but after that it's kinda "meh" and by the time I finished the book I was glad it was over lol. The initial 2/3rds of the book are really good and almost makes up for the lackluster ending (imo).
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...
Just don't read Harrison if you're looking for Heinlein, just as you wouldn't read Delany if you were looking for Asimov, or Le Guin if you were looking for Sanderson.
The End of Everything has ratings that place it in the bottom 0.1% of all published books with >100 reviews. This very strongly suggests that an absolute majority of readers found it frustrating or incomprehensible, and that among those readers are some who had enjoyed his other works.
On Goodreads, that's -4.4 standard deviations.
On Amazon.com, where reviews cluster around 4-4.6 stars, it's -8.5 SD! (Actually quite amazing, when you think about it. It's easily in the bottom 0.1% of titles.)
Check this out: https://emerginginvestigators.org/articles/25-198/pdf
I note that virtually all of the 1 stars are from after it was longlisted. Annoyingly, Goodtime does not provide stats on rating over time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
By Mary's Beard !!
More correctly, by Mary's vote: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/22/i-read-163-nov...
So, a little less than one a day? That seems eminently doable -- I read more than that in my teens, considerably more sometimes, for years at a time. (Of course I had no internet to distract me: my teens were from about 1977 to 1986.)
I have read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 5 times, Kim Stnaley Robinson's Mars trilogy 6 times, and the entire Frank Herbert _Dune_ series twice. In my early teens, if under time pressure, several times I read about half a dozen novels in an afternoon.
For a retired professional? Sure. I'd be surprised if she couldn't.
Around 1997-1998, I was freelance, not working a lot, and lived with a judge of the Arthur C Clarke award. I read pretty much all the new SF published in the UK both years. A couple of hundred books a year, while working.
So at best you skimmed six books in an afternoon, which IS a time-honoured tradition by school kids who have reports due.
Might explain how she landed a role as Professor of classics at Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Banks cheated, with his 'M'.
There've been others, too; notably Children of Men and the Handmaid's Tale. And going back a bit further, Gulliver's Travels (he goes to a different weird place every week, meets weird aliens, and makes some minor political points; that's basically just Star Trek TOS).
Curious what books you think should've potentially clinched it?
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.
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.
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."
EDIT: Oh, actually, missed that Atwood won it for The Testaments! Yeah, I mean that is clearly scifi.
This might make MJH the first Sci-Fi author to win a Booker prize for a Sci-Fi novel.
I would have a hard time countenancing an argument that The Handmaids Tale (and by extension, The Testaments) is not sci-fi, in a world where Heinlein's "If This Goes On—" is widely regarded to be sci-fi.
On the other hand, if Atwood doesn't wish to be regarded as a sci-fi author, so be it
She's repeatedly said she doesn't. Indeed her dismissive remark that "SF is that 'squids in space' stuff, isn't it?" is what inspired the great Ken Macleod to write his "Engines of Light" trilogy which starts with Cosmonaut Keep.
Due to her attitude I've never even tried to read any fiction of hers. Macleod is a genius nearly on a level with his close friend Iain Banks.
I am with the other commenter in this thread: I've read quite a few (usually very highly-regarded) alleged SF novels by literary authors who say they don't write SF. I have hated pretty much every such book.
In fact I don't think "The Handmaid's Tale" really makes sense without the context of the AP feminists. Gilead comes about, as I understand it, because the AP feminists think they can use the Religious Right to achieve their goals and unsurprisingly that goes badly for them. AP feminism doesn't even exist when "Left Hand" was published.
But maybe that’s just post-hoc rationalization for a reactionary stance, idk.
Needless to say, I will also never read any of her work.
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3707723/margaret-atwood-condo-con...
But the difference is that Atwood was, when she wrote "The Handmaids Tale" an author but not a Sci-Fi author. Whereas Butler and Miller were Sci-Fi authors.
And yes, "is this book sci-fi?" is a fuzzy category, and of no great importance.
I respect Margaret Atwood's opinion here but I don't quite hold it myself. More so about Oryx and Crake and sequels.
By "IDK if "The Testaments" qualifies though" I mean that I have not read it, just "The Handmaids Tale" so I'm not going to opine on something that I don't know about.
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.
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.
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.