This bleak but brilliant tale of enigmatic alien entities and slow social collapse exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right nowM 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...
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/09/the-end-of-everything-by-m-john-harrison-review-near-future-visions-from-an-sf-master