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 now M John Harrison’s prose
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...
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