Weird and dangerous flotsam washes up in The End of EverythingDan Kitwood/Getty Images
The best science-fiction book of the year so far has only just been published. The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison, is about half the length of a regular novel, but it’s so powerful and complete that there is nothing slight about it. I consumed it in one greedy gulp before getting up one morning.
Our main characters, Phillip and his grandmother Marnie, live along the south coast of England in the wake of an alien invasion. Since the iGhetti began to appear, the European mainland seems to have disappeared, and it has become very hard indeed to work out what is real and what isn’t. Strange, dangerous artefacts wash up out of the sea. Something called “a bad patch” periodically settles over people, causing them to see things or behave out of character. Maybe. Nothing is clear.
Phillip hunts for alien artefacts, hoping to sell them, and Marnie is an artist. That sounds simple, but right from the start, our heroes don’t behave as we would expect.
There are echoes of Roadside Picnic, the 1972 work by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, in which aliens visit Earth but with no interest in humans, leaving dangerous detritus behind them. There are also reminders of John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, in which the alien invasion begins with pregnancies rather than spaceships. But then again, this is wholly original. It’s a work of genius.
