Alison Flood at New Scientist:
Back in June, our science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson made a bold claim: M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything was not only “the best science-fiction book of the year so far”, but also a “wholly original… work of genius”.
Not only has Emily been proved right, but perhaps she didn’t go quite far enough. This story of an alien invasion won the Booker prize last night, making it – in the Booker judges’ opinion, at least – not just the best science fiction book of the year so far, but the best novel in any genre of the year.
It’s about time. Back in 2009, the great Kim Stanley Robinson – another writer of genius, in my opinion – wrote a piece for New Scientist in which he argued that “three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn’t read”. With remarkable prescience, Robinson even tipped Harrison’s Signs of Life as one of those books.
There has been a long-running reluctance in the literary world to allow science fiction (often abbreviated to SF) into the starry ranks of so-called “literary” fiction.
More here.