Update: I've added links to a couple of article from The Guardian.
M. John Harrison, a "bona fide" science fiction author has won the Booker Prize (gift link).
When M. John Harrison began his writing career, in the 1960s, he sometimes spoke with other science fiction writers about the genre’s poor reputation.
“Why shouldn’t a well written S.F. be considered to be literary fiction?” he recalled asking, during a recent BBC interview.
Some 60 years later, the idea that sci-fi writing cannot hit heights of literature has long disappeared. And on Monday, Harrison’s “The End of Everything,” a novel that imagines aliens overrunning Britain, won the Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award.
The Guardian has published a profile of Harrison based on an interview with him after he won the prize.
The End of Everything took around 15 years to write, with real-world events overtaking him. AI, late capitalism, environmental collapse, the refugee crisis, Brexit – nearly all the manifestations of today’s omni-crisis can be found in the pages of this slim, elusive novel. As its title suggests, this is the work for our end times. “I suddenly thought, ‘Well, you’re 80, you might as well have a go at pushing it over the cliff one more time.’ My rule has always been push it as far as it will go, then move back slightly from the edge. But this time I thought, ‘Let’s push it over and see what happens.’”
This isn't the first time that a science fiction novel has won a major literary award, but they've been books by "literary" authors dabbling in science fiction or fantasy. Harrison is a genre writer who has gained a wider mainstream appreciation.
I've been looking over his bibliography, and as far as I can remember, the only book of his that I've read is "The Centauri Device" which was published in the 1970s, though I'm pretty sure that I've read some of his short fiction.
Now that the genre has conquered the Booker, will the Nobel be next? Ursula LeGuinn's name was mentioned a possible Nobel candidate as has Canada's Margaret Atwood,, though she's more of a mainstream author who has written SF. Personally, I'd like to see William Gibson get a Nobel thoush a more realistic choice might be Kim Stanley Robinson.
Here's another article from The Guardian looking at the fraught relationship between literary fiction and science fiction.
While some past Booker-winning authors draw heavily on SF – Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan – Harrison is the first winner from the “bona fide SF” sphere, said Booker prize foundation chief executive Gaby Wood on Monday. The Pulitzer and the Nobel rarely take notice of SF either, though the latter has honoured Ishiguro and Doris Lessing – both of whom are considered literary writers who dabble in SF, rather than purists, and thus perhaps considered more palatable to a wider reading public.
Ishiguro says that when he emerged on to the British literary scene, he was “mystified” as to why the establishment had “fenced off SF into a ghetto”. He believes it’s done “real harm to the development of ‘literary fiction’ in the UK”, and he “personally felt liberated to go in that direction only in the early 2000s, after noticing – and envying – the brilliance of younger writers like David Mitchell and Alex Garland who were clearly inspired by SF, comics and games”. He notes, however, that his mentor and teacher Angela Carter had “no such prejudices”, often using SF elements in her work.
