I Dunno, Mike; Or, the Nerd Superiority Complex

You may have heard that M. John Harrison, author of the Viriconium books among others, has recently won the Booker Prize (the UK's premier general 'posh' contemporary literature prize) for his latest novel, The End of Everything.

Fair play to him, and everything - I've generally loved the books of his that I have read - but it's at times like these when I feel my Nerd Superiority Complex coming on most intensely. 

I mean, here is the wikipedia synopsis for the novel, to try to help elucidate what I mean:

The setting is South East England in the near future after a crisis has disrupted society. Monstrous and mysterious iGhetti have appeared in the City of London. They are large translucent columns which distort reality, creating "bad patches" of anomalous and unstable environment. Central government seems to have collapsed and Europe is now a "lost continent". But many features of society remain and the main protagonist, Phillip Tennent, makes a living in Dalston-on-Sea by beachcombing for artefacts spawned by the iGhetti which wash up on the shore. 

 He finds an artefact which develops human characteristics: growing limbs, starting to speak and developing a relationship with Tennent's Aunt Marnie, who is an elderly artist with dementia. The story follows Tennent and his aunt as they both make journeys from the coast to London – Tennent trying to sell the artefact while his aunt is driven from their community after killing a teenager.

I dunno what you make of that; maybe to somebody who has never read any post-apocalyptic or dying Earth fiction before, that sounds original and innovative? But to my eye it just looks like a much, much less interesting and much more cringingly on-the-nose version of Viriconium or any one of another dozen or so 'end of everything' style books I could name. And this feeling of on-the-noseness and seen-it-all-beforeness just sets deeper as one reads on:

The novel's catastrophe is triggered by the arrival in the United Kingdom of the unexplained iGhetti – "We know nothing about their actual intentions," says one character. "They may not even know we are here." – whose presence can be read as symbolising artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, political chaos, Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, late-stage capitalism or a combination thereof. Placing their focal point in London's financial district was a deliberate choice by the author: the germ of the story was the 2008 financial crisis and the "rage" it made him feel. Harrison was originally unsatisfied with the name but embraced it after realising the ambiguities it evoked: the explanatory "I get it", the acquisitive "I get", the wealth of the Getty family, the i-products of Apple Inc. and the Freudian ego. In writing the book, he said, his aim was depict the "explanatory collapse and epistemological collapse that you see in societies that have suddenly lost their grounding".

I mean, iGhetti? Really? Because it sounds like 'I get' and calls to mind 'the wealth of the Getty family' and Apple? That's what we're going with? That's the level of subtlety and inventiveness we're talking about?

It seems sad and wasteful to me that a man could write a series of works which are as graceful, interesting, elusive, multi-faceted and evocative as Viriconium and then be reduced later in his career to a glorified pun like 'iGhetti' only to win the Booker for it. That in itself is almost like the plot of a Philip Roth novel (aging outsider author writes self-parody; accidentally gets lauded by the literary elite). But it also indicates just how devoid of taste and intellectual curiosity mainstream intellectuals tend to be in comparison to the genuine nerd. Genuine nerds - the people who love a genre so much that they want to push its boundaries as far as it can go - are the real trailblazers. The literati follow distantly in their wake. 

Personally I think the average dying Earth OSR setting has much more of interest by way of depicting 'explanatory collapse and epistemological collapse that you see in societies that have suddenly lost their grounding' than it seems is possessed by The End of Everything. No doubt M. John Harrison is a great stylist. But can we not aspire to anything greater than iGhetti? Is it that for which our ancestors fought and died? 

Nerds - you, the extreme nerds, the nerds of taste, the nerds who have read so many nerd books that nothing impresses them any more outside of those most recherche corners of the nerdosphere, I salute you. You are the true intellectual vanguard. You are the educated elite. Feel your superiority, and embrace it!