M John Harrison's prose has thrilled readers for decades, including notable admirers like Angela Carter, Deborah Levy, and Robert Macfarlane. Yet, snobbery toward the science fiction and fantasy genres has often overshadowed his literary achievements. His 1989 novel Climbers, a rigorously realistic work, promised to change that perception, but his subsequent output has remained genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar.
A Return to Dystopian Visions
In the 1970s and 1980s, Harrison crafted tales of Viriconium, a mythical city crumbling into decadence and chaos. These swashbuckling yet sinister stories offered escapist adventures for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to contemporary mundanity. However, in the 21st century, our world has become fantastical in its own right, and Harrison no longer needs to revisit Viriconium. His new novel, The End of Everything, is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast, a place that feels both familiar and estranged.
The Near Future, Unfamiliar Yet Recognizable
The story unfolds in a near future where a catastrophe has occurred, but it is already old news, and the media seem to have collapsed. Enigmatic alien entities called the iGhetti, first introduced in Harrison's 2017 short story collection You Should Come With Me Now, invaded Britain some time ago, sparking an ongoing war whose purpose no one truly understands. In the absence of any alternative, citizens strive to Keep Calm and Carry On.
The main characters are beachcomber Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie. Phillip sells his lucrative finds on the black market, though how much of the legal economy still functions is unclear. Marnie paints and defends her terraced house from predators and vandals. The police are never mentioned; order, such as it is, is maintained through vestigial community cohesion and survival of the fittest. Marnie, whose tender, almost-romantic relationship with Phillip provides the emotional core of the book, earns our affection while shocking us with acts of pragmatic callousness.
Precision and Disquieting Gaps
Harrison interweaves precise descriptions with unsettling gaps: “Lines of renovated cottages were still half occupied by people from the city trying to live their weekend lives. The cottages were easy to enter and a reliable source of paracetamol. Small birds flocked in the dense shrubbery of gardens run to seed.” Occasionally, there are orienting references to “the middle Thatcher period” or “the influenzas and Covids of his childhood.” The story begins with Phillip retrieving something from the tideline that is beyond our comprehension—an “artefact” that everyone regards as inanimate but exhibits alarming signs of humanity.
The Enigmatic Artefact
What should be done with this “biological gadget” dumped into the sea by the iGhetti? Phillip wants to sell it. Stashed in his vehicle, it stares at him with a half-formed face, regenerates a severed hand, and makes infantile attempts at speech. By the end of the book, it is driving the car and trying, in its soullessly artificial way, to become Marnie's inseparable companion. In the interim, we discover that there are more of these artefacts around than we thought.
There is no mention of AI in the narrative—the world wide web has evidently unraveled—yet these eerie non-humans that insert themselves into the neighborhood could be interpreted as LLMs made flesh. “It had learned to read in a day,” Marnie observes of her replicant companion, “and often practised by quoting from the ads in the thriving local freesheets. ‘The sky’s the limit … for Rhino Roofing!’” The AI hallucinations we currently see on our digital devices are thus embodied in a way that is disturbing, hilarious, and poignant. “Where did I come from?” the artefact asks Marnie. “Do you know?” To which Marnie, tortured by weariness, loss, and encroaching dementia, can only answer: “What are you really? And what do you think of us?”
Morality in a Collapsed World
Sad reminders of a long-irrelevant morality surface from time to time, such as when Marnie finds the artefact browsing for clothes in an abandoned Oxfam. “You should always be careful to leave the money,” she counsels it as it stuffs items into a bag, “even if there’s no one behind the till.” As for Phillip, he nurtures hopeless dreams of sailing across the Channel to a better life in mainland Europe, musing bitterly that nobody knows how to make good use of the new world's opportunities, “only to live a worse life of the kind we already had.”
Beyond Science Fiction
Despite its SF elements, The End of Everything is about everything. Unlike most novels with such ambitions, it ticks no hot-topic boxes and appears uninterested in daily news feeds. It shows a society that has long since forgotten Trump, social media, and Middle Eastern genocides. Yet it burrows deep into our psyches—into the psyche of our civilisation—and exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now.
A Challenging Read
Caution: it won't be for everyone. In a second-hand copy of Harrison's 2020 Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, next to a passage where a character is “too depressed to try and tease out whatever meaning might be hidden in all this,” the previous owner scribbled “SUMS UP THIS WHOLE BOOK!” Such a reader would be even more exasperated by The End of Everything, which turns the dial up several notches. Harrison still evokes painterly fugues of light and pungent smells, but they are offset by a growing bleakness and less humour. Some dialogue feels like Harrison's own metaphysical musings rather than characters' speech. And there will always be readers who balk at science fiction, refusing to accept that our lived reality is saturated with it, and that the time for earnestly realistic state-of-the-nation novels may have passed.
Dreamlike and baffling, The End of Everything elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity. Michel Faber's novels include The Book of Strange New Things. The End of Everything by M John Harrison is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99).
