I'm so glad the book got long-litsed for Booker Prize. The book is written beautifully, but paints a painful and bleak picture. I love that the book doesn't really take the easy route and offer some childish optimism or whatever. it just grabs your face and shoves it in some blackcurrant pie of an invasive apocalypse. I felt like the book (slight spoilers) is getting us to think of ourselves as the invaders, by making us experience the invaders with absolutely no context. Also, the book is so goddamn random. Like a full on fever dream. It's also so suddenly darkly funny out of nowhere, and then returns to serious philosophy. Very surreal.
I seriously hope it wins. Considering that Prophet Song won recently, it certainly feels like speculative fiction is making it big in the Bookers how horror is making it to the Oscars finally.
I loved it. I think it really captured our “crazy, history-defining things happen daily with seemingly minimal reaction” reality we’re living in. JD Vance recently said “If Watergate happened today, it would only be a 24-hour story” and as much as I pains me to agree with him, I do. The dehumanization of the aliens (and the numbing impact it has on how people treat non-aliens too) was really well-done.
Prophet Song won in 2023 and Orbital in 2024. I hope this doesn't affect Harrison's chances of winning. They may not want SFF to win three out of four years. Have you read MJH's other work? He's my favorite living writer. The End of Everything is perhaps not my favorite book of his -- largely, perhaps, because it makes itself intentionally unlikable by refusing to give you any empathizable characters -- but I can appreciate how he's changing and doing new and radical work into his 80s.
Do you feel that the characters are unlikeable in a way that is different than his earlier novels? I've never really found an MJH character likeable - which is, in part, why I love his novels!