In M. John Harrison’s most recently published novel, The End of Everything (Serpent’s Tail, 2026), the reader encounters a narrative that is as chaotic and combative as its title suggests. Strange life forms have invaded London and its environs (or have they?). A continent has disappeared. The trappings of civilization have begun to unwind. The compounding of various disasters and catastrophes leaves Marnie and her nephew Philip culturally, spiritually, and socially unmoored. I sat down with M. John Harrison to unpack some of the novel’s most trenchant commentary. The following is a transcript of our conversation.
You’ve had quite a prolific career as an author. Some of your books are labelled sci-fi while others seem to straddle sci-fi and literary fiction. Are these generic conventions important or meaningful to you as an author?
That is such a complex question. For me that tension between the two modes has been the central tension of everything I write, whether it’s a sci-fi novel or a literary-adjacent novel. In the ’80s I wrote The Course of the Heart, a fantasy novel about fantasy novels, in tandem with Climbers, an autofiction designed to record everything I knew about rock climbing at the time, and to describe that as an escapist experience. I’ve run the two extremes in parallel ever since, trying to convey to the reader that both can be in one writer’s (or one reader’s) comfort zone. I cut my teeth on sci-fi fifty years ago, but now I’m not really comfortable in a category of any kind. I’m just me.
The title of The End of Everything is a highly confrontational title, particularly at this juncture in history when so many of us feel that our political and social realities have irrevocably changed, that the future is uncertain, and that a civilization-ending event is increasingly likely. Can you give us any insight into why you chose this title?
I always have problems with titles. I had about seventeen this time. I kind of auctioned them off to Serpents Tail. “Here’s a list. I give up.” In the end, we decided on The End of Everything because it poses so many questions. Is this the end of everything? What is the end of everything? What’s a disaster, for instance? Since the 1950s, in the aftermath of WW2, we’ve thought of catastrophe as bounded: disaster as a single event which plays through and has a beginning and an end. Essentially, as an invitation to repair the damage and go back to the ground state. I suddenly thought to myself, “This is not how disasters actually happen.” We’re in the middle of two or three now. They’re running concurrently, and they will probably never end. It seems to me that in reality what you do with a disaster is to get used to it. In the UK, the governmental responses to the eco-disaster are that of acclimatization, accommodation. We no longer talk about changing things. We no longer talk about avoiding the consequences. We talk about learning to live with it. To me, there are certain kinds of accommodation, particularly middle-class ones, which are essentially the attempt to ignore what’s going on. I see no difference between the two, so The End of Everything as a novel is really about people trying to continue to live as they’ve always lived, when, really, they haven’t got a clue what’s happening to them.
There’s no ideological or cultural scaffolding anymore: whatever has happened to the world, it’s taken away our reliance on our own culture.
The plot of The End of Everything is suffused with casual, almost offhand instances of brutal violence. The severing of a young boy’s femoral artery, Marnie firing a handgun at random into a crowd of her neighbors, to name a few from the opening chapters. Why did you approach these instances of violence in this casual, offhanded way?
Violence is an absurd response to things. I think it should always be presented as flatly as you can manage. Otherwise, you risk glamorizing it. As a character, Marnie isn’t entirely in control of her own decisions. She’s confused. She’s in the leading edge of what would seem to be Alzheimer’s, and she’s surrounded by an environment which has changed from that which is reliable into one which is not only unstable and undependable but has no explanation. There’s no ideological or cultural scaffolding anymore: whatever has happened to the world, it’s taken away our reliance on our own culture. So, she doesn’t really know what to do and how to respond. I wanted to give that feeling because I believe we’re in that state now.
The End of Everything takes place in a future where the iGhetti—extra-terrestrials? Or super-intelligent life forms that were inadvertently created by humans?—have invaded. Perhaps in the wake of the banking crisis. The mystery about the origins of the iGhetti is never resolved. Is it foolish to read a straightforward allegory or symbol in the iGhetti? Are they a new pandemic? Are they AI? Are they proprietary tech created by Apple, and that’s why they have a mini “i” in front of them? Can you give us any insight into the nature of the iGhetti?
One of the ideas behind the book was to put the reader in the same position as the characters, who don’t know what’s happened to them. But certainly, you could choose from a sheaf of explanatory possibilities here, many of which you touch upon in the question. They are perhaps aliens. If they’re aliens, they seem to be highly interested in economic affairs. At the same time, they seem to be as completely useless at interacting with our forms of economics as they do with our architecture. My idea was to give the reader the feeling that neither party in this alien invasion—if that’s what it is—has really has any idea of what’s going on. They don’t understand us, and we don’t understand them. There’s an element of parody in this, of course: it’s not accidental that the aliens have taken over the financial system. The Hollywood idea of a disaster is that we understand what the aliens are doing: they’re here to take things away from us, and we’re here to keep them. But in The End of Everything, neither side knows quite what’s happening. Neither side, I suspect—and this is just a suspicion—is entirely certain that the other side is even there. How often do you walk down a road thinking about all the insects that live in it? You don’t. You have no idea how they perceive the world. The cat that eats a housefly has no concept of the universe that the housefly lives in. The housefly that’s eaten has no idea what a cat is. It’s just an event.
So much of the plot of the book takes place at the seaside, and not necessarily in London, which is sort of a no-go zone. But when we are in London, the Thames serves as a spot where the protagonist Philip experiences his first “bad patch,” a hallucination of a horrific experience. Both the sea and the river seem to be the inflection point for the contact between the two humans and aliens. Is there something specific that the water represents?
The idea was that river and coast would stand in as boundaries. They would imply the concept of boundary, but also the concepts of flow and change. I think if you’re writing a novel which is essentially determined not to tell a story in the sense that we expect a story to be told, then you need some very basic images of movement to keep the thing going. At the same time, there’s a further element of parody here. A continent has been lost during the invasion—if that’s what it was—and the sea is a basic metaphor for distance and separation.
I’m interested in relationships which fail but continue, between people who don’t quite understand each other, who don’t really know who it is they’re trying to form a bond with.
Can you elaborate on the relationship between Phillip and Marnie? Marnie is Phillip’s aunt, and they also have this one-sided epistolary relationship. It is a kind of a strange familial relationship. Can you give us any insight into what inspired you to write it that way?
I’m interested in relationships which fail but continue, between people who don’t quite understand each other, who don’t really know who it is they’re trying to form a bond with. There’s a rather more detailed version of this kind of relationship in my previous novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. Marnie and Phillip’s relationship started back before the disaster, when society was stable and relationships could be formed through normal, predefined channels. What I wanted to do was mirror the failure of communication between the human beings and the aliens—if that’s what they are—and to take the bleakness of the new cultural landscape into the relationship, so that they’re trying still—particularly Marnie is trying still—to have the relationship of an older aunt to a younger child. It’s creaky but it’s real to her, or was. Whereas Philip has already been destroyed as a human being in terms of having a relationship with anything or anybody, by a complete loss of cultural and epistemological support. So, Marnie and Phillip represent less a relationship than a collision of two people who don’t really know how to grasp things anymore, how to get hold of things, how to deal with interconnection. I wanted that situation to bounce back into our world and into the kind of alienation that we all now suffer under capitalism.
Several times you’ve mentioned culture and the role that culture plays in supporting human beings. Can you, first of all, expand on what you mean by culture? And then can you talk about what you think is at stake when culture fails?
Our need for culture produces culture, and the culture then produces a need for further culture. That, essentially. It’s a lot of big feedback loops working together. By the time a culture has settled down into being what we would recognize as a culture, then those feedback loops are very hardwearing, very tight, very complex. All of that saves having to reinvent our relations with others every time we meet. It provides a suite of shared assumptions without which no social mechanism can actually operate. A culture is the ground rules. It’s the basic assumptions that we make.
The moment you use the word “relationship,” you’re in your culture. You’re using the cultural desktop. To go back to the cat and the housefly, the cat can’t know the culture of the fly. It can’t interface with the culture of the fly because it uses the culture of the cat. I think that the culture that arises is not inevitable. As in evolution, it’s not teleological. It’s not part of a process that leads to some best-practice outcome. It’s an accident which has looped into a very strong feedback relationship between itself and its users. It’s almost a mechanical description.
I’m really fascinated by your use of language throughout the novel and especially in direct discourse. One example that I isolated here, when Marnie encounters the Gauf brothers: “After that, they got up and moved to a table further away, and the rest of their conversation became even more garbled. She thought she heard one of them spell out the word toes, then recite house, louse, mouse. Yes, mouth, but touch.” Are there any elements to the way that you approach the direct discourse that you could elaborate on?
Only to say that I’m fascinated by different types of discourse, different registers. I love tone shifts. I mean, that’s a classic, to have Marnie one moment speaking directly to these two guys, and then in the next, there’s been a shift of register and tone and they’ve ghosted her and you’re overhearing them in what seems like a language lesson. Change the register in which you describe the scene and you change the nature of the dialogue. That enables you to manipulate the distance between the reader and the subject matter. You’re inside Marnie, but you’re focused on somebody else. Other times, the text pulls right back off all the characters, but you hear the voices of two characters speaking as if they’re quite close to you—it’s a cinematic effect that manufactures distance between the reader and the events in the text. I wouldn’t want to call these games, but they’re playing out through the novel, especially in these unsignaled switches in tone and focus.
Marnie keeps telling Phillip that she knows what he’s doing at the seaside. Then there are some startling images of Phillip either merging with the artefact or doing something that Marnie is catching or interrupting him doing with the artefact.
I think it would be better to put it the other way around. The artefact is doing it to Philip. It’s simply trying to learn who he is and how to have a relationship with him. But of course, it’s got it all wrong because essentially, it’s an alien. I see the artefact as a machine left behind from the original appearance of the aliens, which they discarded, but which is still alive and still trying to do its job, which I find sad. It’s trying to be helpful and even succeeding at times. It becomes Marnie’s chauffeur because that’s what she needs. Once I glimpsed the artefact in a fully grown-up form acting as a chauffeur and a carer, I went back through the draft and managed it from that point of view, allowing it to become a metaphor for the development and intrusion of AI into our lives.
In addition to Marnie, who is in her 70s, there are a number of older people and visions of older men in the text. You’ve written a novel where there aren’t very many young characters. Was that something that you did deliberately?
Not initially. I think that’s a side effect of being 80 years old. As soon as I spotted it, though, I thought it was a partly conscious prompt and I’d better allow it to come through. When I’m writing I want to be spoken to by bits of myself that I might not have acknowledged or even detected. I think if you live your life as somebody who always wants to be moving on and doing something different, then probably there are ancient versions of you who are still running to catch up. They’re shouting, “Hey, what about me? What about the way I think about things?” So, as soon as I recognized that in the text, I encouraged it.
Much of it is parodic and self-parodic. Obviously, the old men with their dreams of Spitfires and the Second World War and their collections of postwar comics, that’s an outright parody of boomers and boomer culture. I had a great deal of fun with it. I wish I’d done more, except that I wanted to write a short book, and so I cut a lot.
Are there any authors or texts that you are heavily influenced by or see this work in conversation with?
It took quite a long time to write this book, even though it’s short. There was a moment back in about 2011 when I had to admit that, at one level, I was trying to write the novel that I would have written when I was submitting stories to New Worlds magazine in my twenties. I couldn’t have done it then, and was just wise enough not to try. Once you admitted that, you also have to admit that you’re still submitting it, to some kind of superego, comprised of all the writers we admired back then, the primary one for me being JG Ballard. Lots of other influences in there. Always Eliot, always The Waste Land. Always 1920s and ’30s travel novels, travel books. Those people were so good at landscape, and they were so good at putting human beings into a landscape. When you’re 80 years old, it’s your entire lived history that’s doing the writing. You shouldn’t really pick out a single influential event, issue, person, writer and credit them as an influence. And there’s as much deliberate reference here as influence, if not more. Much of it is, again, outright parody and self-satire.
You seem to have drawn a vast pool of knowledge about fine art. Do you have a background in the visual arts?
No, I’m just a lifelong consumer. The book is really about the way we warehouse art, about the way we consume art now, in these achingly postmodern buildings, heavily curated by people who have an astonishingly sophisticated knowledge of what they do, and a lot of very interesting viewpoints on art and the art that they’re curating. Not to mention what Will Eaves once called “the inevitable gift shop.” Also, that coast is a center of gentrification via the arts—I really wanted to keep the feeling of that rather than to talk about the art itself. The older I get, the more I distrust discourse. So, my tendency with art is to not want to be told anything about it or to learn anything about it, but just be in a room with it. Just the same as I don’t really want to be told about music or writing (or landscapes—I just want to experience them, be in them, use them). And I think there’s a very considerable difference there between the experiential and the discourse-based.
[I]f you write fiction, something resembling a zeitgeist will come out through it. It’s like autobiography: whatever you write, you’re in it somehow.
You’ve written something that really speaks to the moment. The fact that you started writing in 2011 is incredible considering how prescient a lot of the themes in the novel are.
I hope I have. But I wouldn’t want to take too much credit: themes and ideas often become visible before we think they do. Anyway, I don’t like to grip the central ideas and imagery of a book with a predefined discourse. I like them to come out of nowhere and put themselves down on the page and only then introduce me to how they fit with all the other things that are already down on the page. The book, to a degree, self-assembles by feedback; then I edit it into shape. I think, too, that it’s not so much prescience as of unconscious perception—being, unconsciously, day by day, minute by minute, aware of what’s happening in your culture. “Unconsciously” being the important word. Ballard was so good at this. We may not be able to pin it down. We may not be able to turn it into a logical, explanatory experience for the reader. We may have to invent a poetics to convey it. But if you write fiction, something resembling a zeitgeist will come out through it. It’s like autobiography: whatever you write, you’re in it somehow. Similarly, I think that if you wanted to avoid being with the zeitgeist, you’d have to work very hard at that.
Not to contradict you, but I do think a lot of people have the impression that the zeitgeist is split, and we’ve been siloed into these different mini-cultures, through social media and algorithms. It’s almost like we’re not experiencing the same reality.
That would explain how difficult it is to communicate between silos. I think the silos themselves are held in a zeitgeist. Communities are incidental members of an uber-community, an infrastructure. I think I come from a generation which won’t now be able to cure itself of thinking in that way. That’s my vision of how you interact with your deep culture—even when it’s patently breaking and reconstructing itself—without even knowing what it is you’re interacting with. That’s why big change leaves people behind. In five years’ time one might be writing a book which describes that.
The End of Everything is now available from Serpent’s Tail.
M. John Harrison is the award-winning author of many novels, including The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. He lives in Shropshire.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 