At 80, SF Author M John Harrison Reflects on His Career and Alien Intelligence
Three years ago, in a greasy spoon on the outskirts of the City of London, M John Harrison – known as Mike to his friends – discussed the novel he was working on. Instead of focusing on the plot or characters, he emphasized the challenge the book posed to him as a writer. With this work, he said, he intended to push boundaries as far as possible.
That novel, The End of Everything – his 13th – is now set for publication. It depicts a Britain in decay, dominated by the iGhetti – enormous, powerful, and peculiar lifeforms resembling powdery, slow-motion explosions. Their rule extends over the country and possibly the world. Yet, the novel reveals little beyond what its characters understand, which is minimal, making it more an alien evasion than an invasion narrative.
The origin of the iGhetti is unknown. They might have emerged from the astral plane or "out of the internet." Their intentions remain unclear. Remaining authorities regard them as hostile, deploying ineffective bombers and attack helicopters, but the newcomers might be engaged in "spiritual tourism and gentrification" rather than colonization. Harrison, speaking on a sunny terrace of a riverside pub in Barnes, south-west London, where he once lived, states:
"If we were to meet a real alien, we would have no clue whatsoever what they quote ‘thought’, or why they did anything, or if they thought they were doing something."
He adds that science fiction often acknowledges this idea superficially but rarely conveys that uncertainty to readers.
Harrison is a slim, agile 80-year-old with a full white beard and long hair. His skin has a nutty tone, unusual for writers, reflecting a life spent largely outdoors. While photographs show austere facial planes, in person he often laughs, and his enthusiasm when discussing the demands of his new book reveals how much he enjoys his work.
Early Career and Influence of Iain Banks
This enjoyment was not always present. In 1998, a year after publishing the bleak, toxic waste-themed dystopia Signs of Life, Iain Banks took Harrison out for a night of drinking in Soho to encourage him to return to the purer science fiction realms where his career began. Harrison recalls:
"I always keep in mind what Iain said to me, which is that I don’t have enough fun on the page. That was hurtful."
The following day, he began writing notes for Light, the first volume in his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. It was not the space opera Banks suggested but a parody of one, as nothing with Harrison is straightforward.
"Nothing at all," he agrees happily.
Background and Literary Beginnings
Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, Harrison had a difficult relationship with his father, an engineer who died when Harrison was 13. He frequently skipped school, spending part of each day in the local library. He explains:
"The great thing about libraries then was there weren’t so many dust jackets about. I would pick a book up, read the first two pages, think, ‘Oh wow, that’s weird’, and it would turn out to be a Robbe-Grillet, and it would open a door to the anti-novel. Or it would be Ballard, or another sci-fi book. You never knew what you were going to get."
Harrison began writing as a teenager in the 1950s, when fantasy and sci-fi genres were supported by numerous monthly magazines. In 1966, one accepted a story of his. He moved to London and wrote obsessively through the night. Meeting Michael Moorcock, then editor of New Worlds magazine, he became a regular contributor. He states:
"I had to be in New Worlds, because it was Ballard’s main medium for short stories at that time. It was at the height of my interest in him as a kind of combination of a surrealist and an imagist. Especially in the short story form. And I wanted to be that. I really wanted to be that."
On his blog, Harrison described The End of Everything as a book that might have been serialized in New Worlds circa 1967. He concedes:
"I think it might have been too much even for them. I wanted it to have the flavour of the novel that I would have submitted then if I’d had any technique, skill or talent, a book that on the surface looks like sci-fi but then, as you read it, gets depthier and depthier. That was what I wanted. My heroes could do that. And now, 60 years later, so can I."
He laughs but acknowledges it took a long time to reach a place where he was satisfied with his work and its reception. The 1970s saw him challenge genre conventions in sci-fi and fantasy, attempting to undermine them in The Centauri Device (a book he now disparages) and his Viriconium sequence. A breakthrough came when he resolved to write a short story without planning or notes. The New Rays is "about Katherine Mansfield. And it’s for Katherine Mansfield." He admired Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’s work with fragmented narrative but initially lacked the approach to adopt that style. He explains:
"The only techniques I had were almost exactly opposite to what I needed. They were the techniques of genre fiction: making a narrative, making a synopsis, following the synopsis, making the causalities plain, following the causalities. And none of that would do."
Life Outside London and Creative Peak
By 1982, when The New Rays was published, Harrison had left London for the "boondocks outside Huddersfield" to pursue rock climbing obsessively. The next two decades, which produced Climbers (1989), The Course of the Heart (1992), and Signs of Life (1997), were his most creatively intense years. He reflects:
"I let it take over. And I produced, as a result, several short stories and three novels that had real depth and density of observation, and a deep, dense sense of place."
This understates the significance of Climbers, considered one of Harrison’s masterpieces and among the best English novels of the last 50 years. The book follows a group of climbing enthusiasts in the Peak District, individuals often out of sync with the wider world, a common trait among Harrison’s protagonists. Despite praise from figures like Robert Macfarlane and Olivia Laing, it remains relatively obscure.
As we moved from one pub to another through quiet Barnes streets, Harrison recalled the moment the book became possible. Leaving a quarry outside Sheffield at sundown, he noticed:
"The way the sun related to the jagged top of the quarry, from my viewpoint, meant the shadows looked like the turned-down pages of a book. I stopped and scribbled that in one of my notebooks. I suddenly thought, I can do this. I’m the person to do this. It was really weird. What had stopped me from writing fiction about my own experience, or even nonfiction, was that I didn’t really feel I was the person to do it. I didn’t feel I had the authority. And then I wrote that sentence down, looked at it and thought, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ It was amazing."
He remains surprised by that realization decades later:
"You hunt for that your whole life."
Discovering a New Voice and Creative Duality
Determined to stop apologizing for not being a traditional science fiction writer, Harrison began producing work he fully believed in. However, he describes an uneasy relationship with his creativity:
"It was like discovering a different voice inside you. And it was better than me. I’m going to tell you this," he lowers his voice as if the other presence might overhear, "He knows more than I do, he’s more mature than I am, he’s a better writer than I am, and he has very considerable contempt for me. But every so often he’ll look at something and think, yeah, that’s OK, and he’ll step in and take over and produce something like Climbers."
At times, Harrison feels like an impostor:
"There are two of us and one of us knows he’s the real me, and it isn’t me."
He quickly laughs, dispelling the eerie atmosphere, as if stepping out of one of his own fictions where terrible truths emerge in mundane settings such as a Pizza Express, a provincial courtroom, or a Barnes pub after the lunch rush.
Later Years and Recent Success
After moving back to London upon realizing he was too old to continue climbing – and possibly because some in the climbing community were "offended by the clarity of the portrait" – Harrison experienced a moment of anger at a publishing party in Covent Garden in 2012. He recalls:
"I got outside, and the rain was pissing down and I flashed back to 1968: same street, same rain, same sense of failure, same sense of not getting on with the industry. I thought: ‘I’ve wasted 30 years of my life in London and I’m no further forward. I’ve learned all this stuff and I can do all these things and it’s still not been recognised.’ The solution, I thought, was to ‘be even more uncompromising in the provinces.’"
He relocated to Shropshire with his partner, editor and writer Cath Phillips, and began writing The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Frances Wilson, chair of the judges, described it as "a literary masterpiece." Harrison remembers the ceremony, held online due to Covid restrictions:
"I felt so relieved. I had a drink or two and fell asleep. I relaxed for the first time in about 40 years. I thought: ‘I won a proper prize. I can go to sleep now.’"
While many authors’ work declines in quality with age, Harrison has produced some of his best work in his 70s and 80s, including Sunken Land, The End of Everything, and his "anti-memoir" Wish I Was Here. One reason climbing was an ideal subject is that he is motivated by problems, and climbers view a rock face as a sequence of problems.
The Challenge of The End of Everything
The challenge presented by The End of Everything, which he mentioned in that greasy spoon in 2023, was how to omit much while still exploring how "human beings are working with broken epistemologies to try and understand the world that we’ve made." He explains:
"The enigmas of reality, as in, say, quantum mechanics, aren’t the real mysteries any more. The real mysteries are what the fuck we’ve done to the world, why we did it, and what epistemology we used to perform this act of vandalism."
Conveying bafflement without sacrificing readability has been a recurring problem for Harrison over 30 or 40 years. He says:
"You’ve got to be so careful with explanation. If you help the reader too much, you lose that inexplicability. You’ve got to commit."
The End of Everything is the result of that commitment, thrilling because of, not despite, its resistance to disclosure.
The book dazzles with invention – from Harrison’s creation of a post-invasion world of semi-abandoned seaside towns, crashed airliners, and repurposed polytunnels, to granular moments that invite rereading for comprehension or to re-experience their strange power: the "clean arch of brand new stars" revealed after the iGhetti’s arrival; the "rich surf of objects" – alien detritus – scavenged from the sea by his characters. It also continues the late-night Soho conversation from nearly 30 years ago. Harrison says:
"I thought: OK, here you go, Iain. I’m having fun but I’m also gonna commit. This is gonna be the one that is written without any compromise."
Despite the ominous title, he advises against reading too much into it. He has two or three short stories that are "being very intractable." Asked about his next project, he laughs:
"Yeah, what’s the next problem? What impossible thing can I try and do now?"
