SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Every year, the Booker Prize honors the best fiction published in the U.K. and Ireland. It is one of the highest achievements in English-language literature. Past winners include Salman Rushdie for "Midnight's Children," Hilary Mantel for "Wolf Hall" and Kazuo Ishiguro for "The Remains Of The Day." This year, the prize went to M. John Harrison's "The End Of Everything," and it is the first science fiction novel to win the Booker in the prize's nearly six-decade history. What took so long? What's it mean for the genre? NPR's Andrew Limbong is here. Andrew, thanks so much for being with us.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
SIMON: I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't heard of the book. Tell us about it.
LIMBONG: So it's set in this dystopian near future, but it's not exactly clear at the start what's happened that's caused this dystopian future. And we begin by following this guy named Phillip, who's a beachcomber. So he spends his time along the southern coast of England looking for stuff to sell. And he comes across this blob. It's hard to explain, but it's this shape-shifting thing that grows and regenerates. It ends up talking, and Phillip takes it under his care. All the while in the background, we're being given this information about an alien invasion, the iGhetti. But again, it is not super-duper clear what kind of aliens these are or what, really, the invasion itself caused.
SIMON: And I gather M. John Harrison isn't one of those novelists who overexplain circumstances...
LIMBONG: (Laughter) No. No, no, absolutely not. This is very much a vibes-based book. And it's a pretty slim one, too. This is, like, under 200 pages.
SIMON: What has the reaction been to this unexpected win?
LIMBONG: It's been bananas, Scott. It's been bonkers. This is a bit of a divisive book, and I think intentionally so. When M. John Harrison accepted the award, he started by saying he didn't think he'd end up winning. And I don't think that's false modesty. I'm inclined to believe him, judging by the reaction. The book has under three stars out of five on Goodreads, same on StoryGraph. He beat out authors sort of beloved by litfic (ph) fans and critics. You know, you got Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout, Douglas Stuart, which means, you know, there are a lot of people who are displeased by this win, to say the least.
SIMON: There have been, over the past 50 years, a lot of great science fiction novels. What do you think put this one over the top?
LIMBONG: I think it is because of - right? - and not in spite of that ambiguity that is frustrating so many readers, that the judges kind of warmed to it, right? So a few weeks back, the Booker judges had this panel - right? - where they talked about each book on the short list. And when they talked about this one, they talked about feeling absorbed by it, swept away by the language. And they were OK not knowing exactly what was going on and yet feeling as if it was speaking directly to the now, right? Which, you know, I should say, is well within the tradition of science fiction - right? - especially among the more contemporary weird lit stuff where you're sort of expected to not fully grasp what's going on and just hang on for the ride.
SIMON: What do you think this might mean for the world of science fiction?
LIMBONG: Yeah. There's always an interesting tension between outsider genres and the establishment, right? I think that's true of music. That's true of film. It's this mixture of, like, we don't need you. We've got our own stuff going on, right? Fighting with the, like, oh, thank you for recognizing all the stuff we do. I spoke with Lisa Yaszek. She's a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech, and here's what she had to say.
LISA YASZEK: I think, in that respect, science fiction doesn't need the Booker award, but I think the prize matters because it could change how we think about literary achievement, right? It's not just about giving science fiction more prestige. It's about recognizing that science fiction has helped shape the history of literature itself.
LIMBONG: It's funny, Scott. In that intro, you mentioned Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, right? Both writers were definitely influenced by speculative fiction, right? Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" has all these sort of, like, magical realism elements. And Ishiguro won for "The Remains Of The Day," but he'd go on to write two books set in the future that feature - I don't know - let's call them like nonhuman characters. And so, you know, like, literary fiction has this way of using tropes and ideas from sci-fi. But the sort of dyed-in-the-wool, hard sci-fi writers tend to get overlooked until now.
SIMON: Could that change?
LIMBONG: I think it's tough to say. The Booker Prizes aren't like the Nobels, right? It's not a career award. It's for a singular book. And so M. John Harrison's history of working in sci-fi mags and pioneering a new wave of science fiction in the late '60s and early '70s supposedly had nothing to do with this win, but, you know, this one might cause future judges to be more open to genre fiction. I've been thinking a lot about when Stephen King was given this sort of, like, Lifetime Achievement award at the National Book Awards, right? People were big mad about it, right? This was back in 2003, and there were critics who said that, oh, sure, he sold a lot of books, but he wasn't writing great literature. And in his acceptance speech, he made this call for sort of, like, literary populism - right? - to expand what, quote-unquote, "great literature" meant to broaden that tent out. And I think this win does something similar.
SIMON: Andrew Limbong, who hosts NPR's Book Of The Day podcast. Welcome anytime here, Andrew. Thanks so much.
LIMBONG: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
