Edmund Gordon in LRB: ‘On his blog, [John] Harrison describes The End of Everything as his attempt to write a novel ‘that might have been submitted for serialisation in New Worlds in 1967’. That makes it sound like a throwback – a curious project for a writer of science fiction. Apart from the odd mannerism – the male characters are called by their last names and the female ones by their first – it doesn’t feel especially retro, but perhaps Harrison has in mind an attitude rather than a technique.’

And: ‘In his “anti-memoir”, Wish I Was Here (2023), he sets out his credo: “Massive amounts of what happens to you will happen via invisible and/or unparsable causal chains. Much of life, you will never know what happens to you at all, let alone to anyone else.”’

You don’t know what is happening to you, but you do know that something is happening.

(a sf 2283)