This year's Booker, a genre-bender lesson

Literature has long maintained a peculiar immigration policy. Novels about unhappy marriages, dysfunctional families, middle-class ennui and diasporic dilemmas are waved through as 'literary fiction'. Those featuring aliens, detectives, ghosts and murders are directed towards the less-respectable 'genre fiction' aisle. Never mind that the latter may have more to say about the human condition than the former.

The 2026 Booker Prize, awarded to 81-yr-old British 'science fiction' writer M John Harrison for The End of Everything, delivers a welcome blow to this literary apartheid. Harrison, the first winner to emerge from SF's established ranks, has spent decades challenging the distinction. His dystopian novel, set in a post-catastrophe England populated by mysterious shape-shifting entities, examines contemporary politics, collapsing certainties and humanity's inability to comprehend its predicament. Hardly frivolous stuff. This silo-isation was not always there. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is simultaneously SF, Gothic horror and philosophical inquiry. Tagore's Khudhito Pashan (The Hungering Stone) is a supernatural tale, imbued in historic fiction exploring the human psyche. The same zanana-isation infects music, cinema, art, even the sciences and tech.

Genres do have their use, sure. They help consumers locate the 'shelves' they are looking for more easily. The danger begins when classification becomes hierarchy, and marketing segues into critical judgement. Harrison's Booker victory should, therefore, be celebrated not so much as science fiction's promotion into literary aristocracy, but more as evidence that the aristocracy has been imaginary and fragile all along. The helpfully-marked shelves can remain. The snobbery should go.