I have to say that I spent a lot of time recommending this author to people. "Light", and "Nova Swing" are both ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE.
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.
> It turned out to be the second book in a trilogy
It's funny, this happened to me as well. A long time ago my sister gave me Wizard by John Varley for Christmas. I read it and loved it, and only noticed after I'd read it that it was a sequel. So I read the first book, and later, when it came out, the third book in the trilogy. I just reread them again a few months ago. Varley is -- was :-( -- very talented.
So, so good. I’ve probably read Nova Swing six times by now…
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)
I loved all three books. I do most of my reading before going to bed. These ones had a huge effect on my dreams, in a way no other books have. I'd describe it as adding colour where there was none before. The prose was exuberant. I usually find detailed descriptions boring, but here it felt like they had a purpose beyond just making you imagine what things looked like.
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.
Love Climbers. I'd strongly recommend Wish I Was Here, which has stuff about the climbing and fell running and is quite interesting "about" Climbers--he calls it an "Anti-Memoir" but it's kind of warmer than the vibes that gives and there's lots of interesting stuff about writing. It is a very dense read but also really funny.
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).
Does it not sell well? Iain Banks famously said that people always assumed his science ficton books were the moneymakers that subsidized his mainstream books, but that it was the other way around — literary fiction was where the real money was.
I've only read a little bit of M. John Harrison, so I may be off the mark, but I wonder if the divisiveness could be because it's marketed as SF, but it doesn't fit into the genre, similarly to Michel Faber, Gene Wolfe, or Vladimir Sorokin.
Good point about Banks. Was amazed that MJH got this exposure--I believe Climbers which is more literary fiction outsold the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, and was reissued with the prestige preface etc. WRT the divisiveness (and I'm his number one fan) some of this is surely because he does go out of his way to be divisive. The nice 81 year old man wins the Booker Prize story is nice but the whole point of Viriconium was that fans of the previous instalment were stabbed in the back, and the overall recognition that people and events aren't internally or externally consistent is normally pushed to the point of provocation.
The term is slightly controversial but usually refers to works that emphasize prose over plot and the interior feelings of the characters over setting or action. More often than not the writing is in some way intentionally difficult, the paragon here being James Joyce. Critics say this is pretentious but fans enjoy being challenged by the writing. If you read something by Harrison expecting Heinlein you'll find rich emotions, a confusing plot, but unlike mainstream literary fiction the setting will have sci-fi elements (or fantasy or both). The range of these works is wide: Harrison definitely, Ballard. Most people would include Dick. Vonnegut said he was re-categorized after writing Slaughterhouse Five even though his writing didn't change at all.
In general, literary fiction has a certain artistic prestige associated with it. Sometimes that is because it focuses more on prose and character than on plot, and at other times because it plays with the novel form in some kind of exciting or challenging way. This is as opposed to genre fiction, which might be more of a comfort plot-driven read which isn't aspiring to the highest prose.
Overall I don't really subscribe to this binary between literary and genre fiction -- I think there's a fair bit of speculative fiction that is serious character-driven art, such as the works of Ursula Le Guin and the Fifth Season trilogy by NK Jemisin. I'd also recommend Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (made into a movie by the Wachowski sisters) as a lovely work of form-bending fiction that's hard to classify as one to the exclusion of the other.
In genre fiction, plot is usually most important, closely followed by setting, with characterization less important (stock characters are acceptable), and prose merely functional. Some genres swap the importance of plot and setting, e.g. fantasy follows the influence of Tolkien and highly values setting.
In literary fiction, the order of importance is reversed. Prose quality is paramount, closely followed by characterization, with setting existing only to serve the characters, and plot hardly relevant at all.
This on the surface makes for boring works, but prose quality actually has the highest skill ceiling of all, both for writers and readers. "Quality" in this sense means "skillfully using words in the manner of literary fiction", which is difficult to detect if you don't read it, but it's a real thing. As appealing as it to assume it's all a big scam, the best literary fiction writers really are better, and the readers can tell, just like you can detect AI slop at the other end of the scale. I imagine if you put enough effort in it's even possible to enjoy reading Finnegans Wake (the final boss of literary fiction).
Plot/setting/character have real life as a reference, making them easier to master.
Do you mean some people find litfic boring? Otherwise, I’m not sure what you mean. E.g. there’s plenty of litfic with exciting, fascinating, and/or gripping plots. M. John Harrison, Doris Lessing, E.L. Doctorow are a few of my favorites in that vein.
Of course someone who finds the nature of the prose itself boring might consider the works as a whole boring. But that’s like saying someone who only sees in black and white finds artworks to be monochrome - it’s a tautology.
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.
Don't sleep on Peter Watts. Blindsight is fantastic..
If you want a shorter taster, the novella The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also brilliant (and it has a handful of short stories that expand the universe, something Watts has done with several of his novels). Very, very dark stuff.
Watts is somewhat divisive, it should be said. Personally, I love his knife-edge prose and punk aesthetic, and I find his rather unvarnished perspective of humankind's place in universe refreshing.
I'm going to assume you mean since 2020ish and include ongoing series that span that?
Martha Wells - Murderbot series (the AppleTV series is entertaining - but understandably drops some of the inner monologue. As usual read books first).
AnnaLinden Weller aka Arkady Martine "A Memory Called Empire" (first in series).
William Gibson - Jackpot trilogy: The Peripheral (2014), Agency (2020)
TV series is great (and cancelled) - books better...
Maybe too old:
"Lady Astronaut" series by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Kim Stanley Robinson "New York 2140".
On a side note I enjoyed Richard Morgan's "No Man's Land" - but it's alternative history fantasy - not sci-fi.
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
> Of course I'd you haven't read him do start with his main series
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_.)
Perhaps he means the Final Architecture series? Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation.
That series is a true favorite of mine, but not everyone I've recommended it to liked it as much as I did.
Elder Race and Dogs of War are also awesome entry points for people who enjoy S&S fantasy and military themes, respectively.
I’m in the middle of _Children of Strife_ right now and I’m not sure I’m going to finish it. Children of Time was great, Ruin was ok, Memory was saved by the ending, but Strife has up to this point been two female protagonists getting tortured and/or abused in various timelines, some of them possibly simulated. Not a great read.
Not sure what your definition is for 'recent' - but "The Expanse" is great IMO, I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the entire series. I've not read any of the "spin offs" from the main storyline though.
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).
The authors of the Expanse have another trilogy called The Captive's War which is pretty interesting. Only 2 of the 3 books are out so far, so I hesitate to recommend it, but I did enjoy those two (plus a novella).
I felt the same about "anti-memetics division"- the first half felt like a couple 'monster of the week" episodes of X-files, then suddenly the tone shifts and the world is doomed, but here's a deus ex machina that is totally justified because everyone forgot about it and here's the explanation how.
Yup indeed, I hesitate to write too much in the comment as I want to avoid spoilers, so I'll just leave it at saying it got a weirdly theistic spin at the end. It is a short book though so overall I'd probably recommend people give it a try at least. Worst case you DNF it after the first half :)
Gnomon is in the cohort of things I read/watched part-way, and then decided to just read the summary on Wikipedia and am glad I didn't waste any of my life reading/watching the whole thing
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.
Harrison is generally very challenging. A lot of people don't want challenging. That doesn't make it bad.
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.
To me, one of the biggest red flags, is a lot of the positive reviews seem to have trouble articulating what they like about the book and come across very generic. I think most of the positive reviews could be written about any challenging book if you just swap out the book title.
This doesn't hold up -- there are lots of challenging books that were well-received by the public, and Harrison's Light and his Viriconium books were also quite well-received. Their review scores -- at around 4 stars -- are perfectly in line with what you'd expect of challenging work. For my part, I read Light and enjoyed it.
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.
Be that as it may, a score of 3.1 (Amazon) and 2.8 (Goodreads) with >100 ratings makes this book an extreme outlier.
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.)
because it's literary fiction. Moby Dick sits at a 3.5 on Goodreads. These sites are unusable for anything that isn't genre fiction. What happens with books like these is that a few hundred people bought it because it was tagged as 'sci-fi' and then got frustrated and gave it a bad review.
There are multiple versions of Moby Dick on Amazon, and virtually all of them are rated >4 stars. The current top-selling version is at 4.6, which is exceptional for a book with >100 reviews:
Literary fiction is, in general, fairly reviewed on Amazon. And yet 3.1 star rating is something I don't think I've ever seen before... It certainly denotes mass dissatisfaction.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't read Harrison, but that sounds a lot like Rudy Rucker, who I found infuriating for having all of the trappings of depth and sophistication but no actual substance.
I read most of the Booker longlist and a ton of other books. I plowed through End of Everything without enjoying it much. Based on other comments I might give some other work of his a go, out of a sense of duty.
Best recent reads were American Hagwon and Partita.
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.
She's 71, so I assume she's pretty much retired, and can dedicate a lot of time to this (you'd really have to be willing and able to do so to sign up for this). That's about one a day. It seems... doable, though it's obviously a lot.
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.
Let’s take your six novels in an afternoon. Il be generous and give you the entire six hours for six novels. Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight. And if any of those six novels had more pages (very likely given the books you name drop) you could easily need to double the number of pages read per minute.
So at best you skimmed six books in an afternoon, which IS a time-honoured tradition by school kids who have reports due.
> Il be generous and give you the entire six hours for six novels.
If you think that is "generous" then you underestimate the levels of focus a teenager (with a young, elastic bladder) can have. Do you know any teenagers?
:-D
> Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel
I just turned 59 this weekend. When I was a kit, books were shorter. Often much shorter. A typical paperback SF novel in the 1970s was under 200pp and typically somewhere around 150-175.
There was a reason for those binge sessions: my family was preparing to leave Nigeria forever, and it took nearly 2 months to do all the paperwork. We lived in the Mainland Hotel in Lagos (it's still there) and my dad had a friend who was a member of the Lagos Yacht Club. Its private library had a very good SF section, but only members could borrow books... So I had to read as much as I could while we were there as guests on Sunday afternoons.
Cue manic hyper-fixated focus.
One of the ones I read in those visits was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. Still a favourite, nearly half a century later.
> it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight.
No problem.
I tore through them as fast as possible, then went back through them in my memory over the following week. Favourites, ones I really enjoyed, like the Clement, some Jack Vance books, some Silverberg, some Sturgeon, I went back and reread.
My greatest "feat" was probably totally forgetting my summer holiday reading a few years later, at school in the Isle of Man. We were reminded on the first day of term. I read all of Joseph Conrad's Victory that night, starting as soon as I got home from school at about 6PM, finishing about 9:30PM, writing a report in the next hour, and then sleeping.
I think you seriously underestimate just how fast a properly fast reader can go. On an unrelated note, I remember a line (from Jo Walton I think) on seeing one of those tedious ads—most CEOs read six book a week. To which, “not surprising, they’ve terribly responsible jobs and not much time”
If you listen her speak off the cuff about material she has read and respond in real time to random questions you would likely soon come to believe her to have significant powers of recall and comprehension .. in a few languages.
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.
Thanks, that was a great summary and completely agree. I'm in two minds about whether it's good for divisive writers to win literary prizes. On the one hand it's maybe better for those who know to keep it to themselves, but I've really enjoyed hearing him talked about today!
What I found most interesting about The End of Everything is that the book aligns better with Trump's rhetoric (the "fake news" of apocalpse, the uselessness of global institutions, a cynical anti-establishment mood) than with someone like e.g. Hillary Clinton's ideals (e.g. the rules based order and that well-crafted policy by experts can overcome global disaster), even though the author specifically wrote it to criticize the very mindset that Trump represents. Our politics are broken
It really doesn't. It doesn't say anything at all about fake news or global institutions and there certainly isn't any cynical anti-establishment mood. Your politics are probably broken, but please don't drag M John Harrison into this. What did you make of Hampson? You thought he was a cypher for some US political figure I suppose. How does Hampson link to characters like Yaxley or Kearney?
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?
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.
> I think the key for me is sci fi being recognised as an important category in media creation
Sci-fi was nerdy and a little juvenile and the identifiable tropes made it an easy target for those wanting to yuck someone else's yum. YA's distillation of the hero's journey into a freebase form has made pieces of genre fiction aren't as formulaic more obviously not juvenile, as the YA genre is pretty much where most juvenile literature is at.
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.)
> 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".
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).
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.
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...
"A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" is one of the most amazing things I've ever read. Especially when you read it alongside Climbers, and spot that the same bit of text is being used to mean two completely different things, to do completely different work.
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 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.
There's been a few scifi authors who've won the Booker Prize for non-scifi; at least Atwood and Ishiguro. And both the Handmaid's Tale and Never Let Me Go were shortlisted for the Booker. But they didn't actually win it.
EDIT: Oh, actually, missed that Atwood won it for The Testaments! Yeah, I mean that is clearly scifi.
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.
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
> Atwood doesn't wish to be regarded as a sci-fi author
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.
As one of very few women in the field, and one of even fewer who writes primarily about women, I tend to think a lot of this attitude is a reflection of the extent to which sci-fi has been an "old boys club" for most of Atwood's career, more than it is about the genre itself
I saw her talk once and I thought this statement was more about her being glib. If I recall what she said correctly, it was “I don’t consider what I write to be science fiction, because something like it has already happened.”
But maybe that’s just post-hoc rationalization for a reactionary stance, idk.
> I recall what she said correctly, it was “I don’t consider what I write to be science fiction, because something like it has already happened.”
AFIAK, this is about The Handmaid's Tale - all of the terrible things in the story had happened somewhere, sometime, to someone, just not "here and now" in the (near future) USA.
Oryx and Crake is a different matter, in speculates on genetic engineering. The case that it's "definitely not sci-fi" is much harder to make. IMHO it is, because it is fiction that speculates on a scientific topic.
It's also certainly not a boy's own space western story of heroics, sure. And it's OK for the author to want to be distanced from that genre stereotype. Of course, not all Sci-Fi is that. Ursula Le Guin has already been mentioned sometimes as a counterexample. But I get her antipathy towards the label because of it
All of literature can be regarded as an "old boys club" if you squint, but it's not like she'd have been unique. "The Left Hand of Darkness" was published before I was born, but I was old enough to read "The Handmaid's Tale" by the time that was published, albeit not quite old enough to properly understand it.
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.
One of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time is a woman. Most consider her to be the best. Ursula LeGuin.
And she absolutely is not the only one. There are plenty of very talented and very popular women authors in the genre.
Margaret Atwood just wants to be thought of as literary.
The handmaid's tale is without a doubt speculative fiction (SF), the umbrella term for writing that includes sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, etc.
Margaret Atwood likes to position herself as a champion of values such as equity, justice, and progress, while using her clout to oppose a multi-family condo development close to her multi-million dollar mansion [1]
Needless to say, I will also never read any of her work.
I would say that Atwood's "The Handmaids Tale" is as much Sci-Fi as similar low-tech dystopias, e.g. "Parable of the Sower" (Octavia Butler), "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (Walter Miller).
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.
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.
I love books that cross the category boundaries. Unfortunately some people do not, and adding a bit too much romance to your sci-fi novel, or too-much sci-fi to your romance novel will likely piss off some readers of the genre and kill the rating, which career writers are forced to maximize for sales. The genres are forced on the book at the publishing stage and, unless you are an established author, picking the wrong one can be a disaster. (Been there, done that!)
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
The distinction is that Harrison has spent his entire fairly lengthy career being published as a science fiction author, and the others did not. They were all firmly in the mainstream literary camp, even if their books occasionally strayed over.
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.
It's funny, this happened to me as well. A long time ago my sister gave me Wizard by John Varley for Christmas. I read it and loved it, and only noticed after I'd read it that it was a sequel. So I read the first book, and later, when it came out, the third book in the trilogy. I just reread them again a few months ago. Varley is -- was :-( -- very talented.
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)
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.
Holy cow that's a strong statement. I guess I'll have to get some of these.
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've only read a little bit of M. John Harrison, so I may be off the mark, but I wonder if the divisiveness could be because it's marketed as SF, but it doesn't fit into the genre, similarly to Michel Faber, Gene Wolfe, or Vladimir Sorokin.
Overall I don't really subscribe to this binary between literary and genre fiction -- I think there's a fair bit of speculative fiction that is serious character-driven art, such as the works of Ursula Le Guin and the Fifth Season trilogy by NK Jemisin. I'd also recommend Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (made into a movie by the Wachowski sisters) as a lovely work of form-bending fiction that's hard to classify as one to the exclusion of the other.
In literary fiction, the order of importance is reversed. Prose quality is paramount, closely followed by characterization, with setting existing only to serve the characters, and plot hardly relevant at all.
This on the surface makes for boring works, but prose quality actually has the highest skill ceiling of all, both for writers and readers. "Quality" in this sense means "skillfully using words in the manner of literary fiction", which is difficult to detect if you don't read it, but it's a real thing. As appealing as it to assume it's all a big scam, the best literary fiction writers really are better, and the readers can tell, just like you can detect AI slop at the other end of the scale. I imagine if you put enough effort in it's even possible to enjoy reading Finnegans Wake (the final boss of literary fiction).
Plot/setting/character have real life as a reference, making them easier to master.
Do you mean some people find litfic boring? Otherwise, I’m not sure what you mean. E.g. there’s plenty of litfic with exciting, fascinating, and/or gripping plots. M. John Harrison, Doris Lessing, E.L. Doctorow are a few of my favorites in that vein.
Of course someone who finds the nature of the prose itself boring might consider the works as a whole boring. But that’s like saying someone who only sees in black and white finds artworks to be monochrome - it’s a tautology.
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.
If you want a shorter taster, the novella The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also brilliant (and it has a handful of short stories that expand the universe, something Watts has done with several of his novels). Very, very dark stuff.
Watts is somewhat divisive, it should be said. Personally, I love his knife-edge prose and punk aesthetic, and I find his rather unvarnished perspective of humankind's place in universe refreshing.
Also, if you like short sci fi stories, hard to beat anything by Ted Chiang.
Martha Wells - Murderbot series (the AppleTV series is entertaining - but understandably drops some of the inner monologue. As usual read books first).
AnnaLinden Weller aka Arkady Martine "A Memory Called Empire" (first in series).
William Gibson - Jackpot trilogy: The Peripheral (2014), Agency (2020)
TV series is great (and cancelled) - books better...
Maybe too old:
"Lady Astronaut" series by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Kim Stanley Robinson "New York 2140".
On a side note I enjoyed Richard Morgan's "No Man's Land" - but it's alternative history fantasy - not sci-fi.
Might want to check science fiction awards+ database https://www.sfadb.com/
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
> https://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Original-Unabridged-Melvill...
Literary fiction is, in general, fairly reviewed on Amazon. And yet 3.1 star rating is something I don't think I've ever seen before... It certainly denotes mass dissatisfaction.
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.
Best recent reads were American Hagwon and Partita.
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.
If you think that is "generous" then you underestimate the levels of focus a teenager (with a young, elastic bladder) can have. Do you know any teenagers?
:-D
> Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel
I just turned 59 this weekend. When I was a kit, books were shorter. Often much shorter. A typical paperback SF novel in the 1970s was under 200pp and typically somewhere around 150-175.
There was a reason for those binge sessions: my family was preparing to leave Nigeria forever, and it took nearly 2 months to do all the paperwork. We lived in the Mainland Hotel in Lagos (it's still there) and my dad had a friend who was a member of the Lagos Yacht Club. Its private library had a very good SF section, but only members could borrow books... So I had to read as much as I could while we were there as guests on Sunday afternoons.
Cue manic hyper-fixated focus.
One of the ones I read in those visits was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. Still a favourite, nearly half a century later.
> it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight.
No problem.
I tore through them as fast as possible, then went back through them in my memory over the following week. Favourites, ones I really enjoyed, like the Clement, some Jack Vance books, some Silverberg, some Sturgeon, I went back and reread.
My greatest "feat" was probably totally forgetting my summer holiday reading a few years later, at school in the Isle of Man. We were reminded on the first day of term. I read all of Joseph Conrad's Victory that night, starting as soon as I got home from school at about 6PM, finishing about 9:30PM, writing a report in the next hour, and then sleeping.
I got a B+.
No, not skimming.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._John_Harrison
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.
Sci-fi was nerdy and a little juvenile and the identifiable tropes made it an easy target for those wanting to yuck someone else's yum. YA's distillation of the hero's journey into a freebase form has made pieces of genre fiction aren't as formulaic more obviously not juvenile, as the YA genre is pretty much where most juvenile literature is at.
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.
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!
Thanks for the warning!
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.
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.
But maybe that’s just post-hoc rationalization for a reactionary stance, idk.
AFIAK, this is about The Handmaid's Tale - all of the terrible things in the story had happened somewhere, sometime, to someone, just not "here and now" in the (near future) USA.
Oryx and Crake is a different matter, in speculates on genetic engineering. The case that it's "definitely not sci-fi" is much harder to make. IMHO it is, because it is fiction that speculates on a scientific topic.
It's also certainly not a boy's own space western story of heroics, sure. And it's OK for the author to want to be distanced from that genre stereotype. Of course, not all Sci-Fi is that. Ursula Le Guin has already been mentioned sometimes as a counterexample. But I get her antipathy towards the label because of it
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.
And she absolutely is not the only one. There are plenty of very talented and very popular women authors in the genre.
Margaret Atwood just wants to be thought of as literary.
The handmaid's tale is without a doubt speculative fiction (SF), the umbrella term for writing that includes sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, etc.
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.