The End of Everything by M John Harrison review – near-future visions from an SF master
This bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right nowM John Harrison’s prose has thrilled me since I was...
By Michel Faber · The Guardian Culture
This bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now M John Harrison’s prose has thrilled me since I was a teen. It has thrilled others, too, including Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Robert Macfarlane, but snobbery about the genres in which he made his mark – science fiction and fantasy – has hindered the respect his achievement deserves. His rigorously realistic novel Climbers, published in 1989, looked as though it might change that, but subsequent work has remained genre-fluid and uncompromisingly peculiar. In the 1970s and 80s, he wrote stories about Viriconium, a fabled city crumbling into decadence and anarchy. These swashbuckling yet sinister tales functioned as escapist adventures for readers who preferred a far-flung nightmare to the contemporary humdrum. But in the 21st century, the world we inhabit has become utterly fantastical and Harrison has no need to revisit Viriconium; his anarchic, disintegrated metropolis is London and The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast. Continue reading...