The Committed Men, M John Harrison’s 1971 debut novel, turns on two pistols and a lizard baby. The first belongs to Clement Wendover, a former GP, his gums “raw and toothless”, now attending to the apocalypse from a wasteland Nissen hut, a picture of JG Ballard on the wall. The second belongs to Holloway Pauce, a 6ft 8in wrong’un in a gold lamé suit. Pauce’s pistol is pointed at the baby – born to a human mother but with the skin of a reptile, which is an adaptation to the toxic world they live in. Wendover had been content to take a back seat. “Up until then he had watched the decline of the world with passive acceptance; taken refuge in dreams because he could not bear the present,” Harrison tells us, as the doctor mulls what to do. It’s time, he concludes, to commit. He shoots Pauce without bothering to take the pistol from his coat pocket.
Such acts of commitment, in the rest of Harrison’s work, are rare. His characters are, more often, the passive ones, victims of certainty who once dared to feel they had the world figured out, before being richly robbed of their delusions. Harrison rarely offers them a way out, nor does he give one to his readers: pick up any of his works and you won’t find an answer, but a better, more unsettling, class of question. Some, like the three students seduced by a sorcerer in The Course of the Heart (1993), don’t even get to know exactly what happened to them one summer’s day in a field near Cambridge. They just get to live with the consequences.
In the same way that those three students never really know what went wrong, I wonder if Harrison ever really knows what went so right. For a chronicler of the postwar English strange, he comes, in a sense, straight from central casting. Harrison, born in Warwickshire, started out selling his short stories to some of the pulpier mid-century science-fiction magazines before moving on to New Worlds, where in 1968 he became its books editor. Rereading his science fiction from the two decades that followed, it is already clear he doesn’t belong: his stories from the period feel like they owe more to Elizabeth Bowen’s ghost stories, or the weirder Katherine Mansfields, than to Ray Bradbury. One of the epigraphs to The Committed Men is from TS Eliot: “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation/With an alien people clutching their gods”.
None of this ever made Harrison a defector, especially given his subject matter: taking one of postwar science fiction’s great obsessions – the end of the world – and making it peculiarly his own. Harrison’s apocalypses are slow burns, in which the world whimpers itself to death, swapping nuclear dread for the kind of irritation we all feel when a train fails to arrive, or a parking ticket is awarded unjustly. In The Course of the Heart, one character dies choking on half a Mars bar, another by driving a milk float into a ditch.
These catastrophes, however, are never, in any real sense, cosy. In fact, it’s usually the opposite: the weird can hit you anywhere, not only on faraway worlds or rooms with pentagram floors. It lives in grubby Peckham apartments; or the space in which the marquee floor meets the garden grass at a wedding; or, in the Goldsmiths Prize-winning The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020), the narrow alleyway separating “Costa and My Little Wedding” in a town on the “brown edge of Wales”. In these worlds you don’t need to seek the weird out. It’ll find you.
Now, with that Goldsmiths Prize in hand and The End of Everything on the Booker longlist, one of English fiction’s great “cult authors” is rapidly losing that qualifier.
Why? First, there are his sentences. Harrison has never taken to being called a stylist, preferring, in a 1986 interview, the more workmanlike “technician”. Yet the phrases are hard to shake. A lot of this comes down to the strange details that most of us are content to forget: the tension of a communal stairway, the faint disgust of fishbones left at the side of a plate, the eroticism of a woman licking a contact lens. Commuters are never commuters, but “denizens of futures that failed to take” as they wait for the fast train to London. The trains fare little better: the seats are greasy, as are the “miserly little seat-back trays” – so greasy that your fingers come away from them with “an inaudible but somehow perceptible little noise”.
There is something else here too, though. Every catastrophist needs their people. Take the two mentioned most in Wish I Was Here, Harrison’s 2023 “anti-memoir”, John Wyndham and JG Ballard. In Wyndham, there is always the possibility of a return to the past, the impulse to, as Shaun of the Dead put it, “go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over”. For Ballard, it is the possibility of transformation: adaptation, good or bad, to whichever world his characters find themselves trapped in.
The End of Everything follows two lost souls eking out lives on the Kentish coastline after a vague but devastating alien invasion, pausing only to fish out the sentient detritus that washes in from the English Channel. It is, by some distance, Harrison’s most Ballard-y novel; a beachy wasteland reminiscent of The Drought, afflicted by the same temporal collapse as in, say, The Terminal Beach. There are even a pair of decadent villains who luxuriously stride around the wasteland in “silk suits without shirts on”.
This is where the similarities end: Harrison’s people are destined not to adapt, indeed not even to try. Even while artillery bursts in the distance and attack helicopters prowl, it remains the keep-calm-and-carry-on show. Families still take their kids out for a day at the beach, grandmothers emerge from their retirement flats, smiling “into the sun in a kind of secret delight” while their husbands swap wartime trivia. Inland, bankers wander, puzzled, around the empty skyscrapers of the City, “still constrained by the concepts of both work and the week”, because they can’t imagine anything else. Like an electric toy train that has fallen off the tracks, there is no forward motion, but the wheels are whirring.
Harrison shows us that our contemporary catastrophes have become almost too cosy, all too easy to ignore. Why embrace the end of the world when you can simply deny it has happened at all? The smoke fills the room. We stay put. Reading The End of Everything, I kept thinking of Mick McCarthy’s now-infamous interview while manager of Blackpool on a 17-game streak with only one win to show for it. It can’t go on like this, surely, the journalist asks. “It can,” comes the reply.
In this way, The End of Everything is less about channelling Ballard or Wyndham than about the forgotten third man of the postwar weird: Nevil Shute, and his 1957 masterpiece On the Beach (yes, it’s always a beach). The citizens of Melbourne, by now aware that the rest of the world has perished in nuclear flame and that a massive radioactive cloud is coming to wipe them all out, do the only thing they can: carry on just as they always have. Gifts for the children’s never-to-be-reached birthdays are bought, trips to town for the weekly shop continue and parents fuss over babies cutting their first teeth as the town readies itself for the last Australian Grand Prix.
No wonder that, in Wish I Was Here, it’s to Shute that Harrison turns. “What sort of disaster are we in? What sort of metaphors does it cause us to seek this week? Are we able to seek anything but the appropriate metaphors? Are we already on rails? Who’s doing for us what Nevil Shute did for the On the Beach generation? What does our disaster – not yet risen to consciousness but already, surely, fully known – feel like?”
The End of Everything is Harrison’s own attempt to answer the question. In a past, more certain world, no wonder Harrison’s novels seemed so strange. Yet, who among us has got through the past decade with all their certainties intact? Who looks back and thinks “Yes, that’s exactly how I thought everything would go”?
In a 2011 interview, the novelist China Miéville was asked directly why prizes such as the Booker so distrusted science fiction. In his answer, he reframed the question. The real schism, he suggested, lay not between literary fiction and genre but in “the literature of recognition vs that of estrangement”. The irony is that it is precisely when the world begins to stop making sense – when wars begin and end inside a single weekend, timed to the markets, and new intelligences are conjured that can do things their own makers cannot explain – that we turn to the strange. Hence Wyndham. Hence Ballard. Hence Harrison.
It’s why the weird, and its capacity to alienate, matters. At its best it stops being a fantastical escapism and loosens our grip on our own realities just enough to let a new one in. As Harrison puts it in Wish I Was Here: “The weird is a way of writing about the real.” Seek out the weird. Sit with it. Do you keep what it teaches you? Or do you throw it away? It’s the inability to do this – a lack of intellectual humility – that dooms so many of Harrison’s characters: alien people, clutching their gods, each at once too estranged and not estranged enough. Through these “punitive fantasies” (Miéville again), Harrison sends us where his characters cannot: out of our loops, and back into the world.
There is, perhaps, one exception. It comes from Climbers (1989), Harrison’s most “realist” novel – a year in the life of a rag-tag crew of drifters, climbing their way out of their lives on whichever Peak District gritstone they can find. It ends with the narrator on an outcrop, looking out to sea: “I sat in the niche for a long time. I realised I didn’t know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn’t know anything about anything.”
It sounds like defeat. Harrison, in his 50-year war on certainty, reminds us it’s anything but.
The End of Everything
M John Harrison
Serpent’s Tail, 208pp, £16.99
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[Further reading: An anti-guidebook to Andy Burnham’s Britain]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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