The End of Everything by M John Harrison review – a vision of the future from the master of SF | Science fiction books

M John Harrison’s writings have fascinated me since I was a teenager. It has also entertained others, including Angela Carter, Deborah Levy and Robert Macfarlane, but making fun of the genres in which they worked – science fiction and fantasy – has denied them the respect they deserve. His famous book Climbers, published in 1989, seemed to change this, but the work that followed remained the same type and very unusual.

In the 1970s and 80s, he wrote stories about Viriconium, a fictional city falling into chaos and anarchy. These fantasy but sinister stories served as escapism for readers who preferred nightmares to contemporary music. But in the 21st century, the world we live in has become very interesting and Harrison has no reason to visit Viriconium; its brutal, chaotic city is London and The End of Everything is set in an unnamed town on the Kent coast.

It is a near future, known but different. A disaster has happened, but it is old news and, in any case, the media seems to have fallen. We gather that a mysterious alien group called the iGhetti – first documented in Harrison’s 2017 short story You Should Come With Me Now – has invaded Britain at some point, sparking an ongoing war that no one understands. Without any other option, citizens are trying to settle and continue.

The most famous is Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie. Phillip sells his findings on what we think is the hidden market, although the amount of money that works is unknown. Marnie paints, and defends her townhouse against enemies and vandals. The police are never mentioned. The system, such as it is, is maintained through social cohesion and the survival of the fittest. Marnie, whose warm, almost romantic relationship with Phillip sets the tone for the book, loves us while surprising us with her brutal behavior.

Harrison, as always, connects the correct description with the disturbing lacunae: “Rows of renovated cottages were still half of the townspeople who wanted to live at the weekend. Sometimes there are references to “the Thatcher era” or “the flu and the Covids of his childhood”. But the story begins when Phillip took something from the waves that we cannot – a “artifact” that everyone sees as an inanimate object, but which it shows signs of human danger.

What to do with this “natural weapon” thrown into the sea by iGhetti? Phillip wants to sell. Hiding in his car, it stares at him with a half-faced face, clawing back a severed hand, trying to speak. At the end of the book, he is driving, trying, in his lifeless way, to be Marnie’s friend. In a short time, we learn that there is more to these ancient things than we thought.

There is no mention of AI in the story – the world wide web has been revealed – yet these dangerous people who immerse themselves in this area can be interpreted as LLMs incarnate. “I learned to read in one day”, Marnie says of her caller, “and she often practiced by quoting from advertisements in local development magazines. ‘The sky’s the limit… at Rhino Roofing!’ “Where did I come from?” the cartoon asks Marnie. “Did you know?” To which Marnie, a victim of exhaustion, loss and confusion, can answer: “What are you really?

Sad reminders of unnecessary behavior from time to time, such as when Marnie finds the tapes while hunting for clothes in an abandoned Oxfam. “You always have to be careful to leave money,” he advises as he puts things in the bag, “even if there is no one behind the sticks.”

As for Phillip, he harbors a pessimistic dream of traveling across the Channel to a better life in Europe, lamenting that no one knows how to make the most of the new world’s opportunities, “only to live as badly as we had before”.

All of which goes to show that despite its SF guise, The End of Everything, as its title suggests, is anything but. Unlike many books with such ambitions, it has no hot topic boxes and seems to have no interest in our everyday issues. It shows us a society that has already forgotten Trump, the media and the terrorists in the Middle East. And yet it burrows deep into our minds – into the psyche of our civilization – and reveals the terrible insecurity of life right now.

Warning: not for everyone. In my second edition of Harrison’s Goldsmiths 2020 award-winning book. The Sun Begins to Rise Againnext to the bit where one is “too depressed to try to laugh at any meaning that might be hidden in all this”, the previous owner wrote “GET TO THE WHOLE BOOK!” Such a reader may be greatly annoyed by The End of Everything, which turns the dial up several notches. Harrison still exudes a sense of evil and good smell, but it’s offset by a growing darkness, and there’s no less humor. Some of the dialogue sounds like Harrison’s metaphysical musings rather than the characters’ speech. And of course there will always be readers who are against SF, refusing to see that our reality has become saturated with it, and that the era of real world literature may have passed. Dream-like and haunting, The End of Everything tells the story of human disintegration in a vivid way.