‘The End of Everything’ Becomes First Sci-Fi Novel to Win Booker Prize

The aliens have invaded, and they’ve already won. M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, a dystopian tale of a man’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world, has just claimed the Booker Prize, a first for a sci-fi novel. The New York Times quotes a Booker Prize statement specifying that The End of Everything is “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide [science fiction] world,” though previous winners, including Margaret Atwood (who won for 2019’s The Testaments) and Kazuo Ishiguro (who won for 1989’s The Remains of the Day, which isn’t one of his genre-influenced works), have “borrowed facets” of the genre. Here’s the official synopsis of The End of Everything: “Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artifacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, an entire continent has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artifact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding, from the peerless master of contemporary fiction.” At 81, Harrison is also the oldest-ever Booker Prize winner, capping off a six-decade literary career; his previous works include sci-fi noir Nova Swing, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards in 2007. The NYT piece points to a recent interview with Harrison in the Telegraph where he spoke about not wanting his work to be pigeonholed by affixing a sci-fi label to it. “That frames it into a single readership. I don’t want that to happen,” he said. Still, we can’t resist claiming The End of Everything as a victory for science fiction. Other books on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist included The Disappearers, by Marlon James; Black Bag, by Luke Kennard; May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry; The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout; and John of John, by Douglas Stuart. Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.