This news isn’t from the tech world, per se, but from the world of literature, unlikely fodder for a headline here, but if you give me some leeway, I’m going to relate it back to the conversation on AI.

“The news” I’m talking about is the award of the prestigious Booker prize in England, to science fiction writer M. John Harrison, who has wowed the crowds with a novel titled “The End of Everything.”

Right off, I thought that the title really struck on how people are feeling about the encroachment of AI and other things. But also, it’s the first sci-fi book to win the prize, notwithstanding previous awards to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of whom, according to critics, “played around” at the edges of the genre.

Harrison’s book goes straight there, with a race of aliens scouring the landscape of post-apocalyptic Earth, and reading what’s left there in the form of “artefacts”.

It also incorporates the author’s colorful style and flair for satire. This is from an announcement by Mary Beard, the head judge on the Booker prize panel, explaining the award choice:

“A slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure, The End of Everything pushes readers to the limits of human understanding.”

It turns out Harrison has been doing this a while: insiders might know him from such works as The Centauri Device, released in 1974, and characterized as an “anti-space-opera,” with villains like General Alice Gaw of the Israeli World Government, and Colonel Gaddafi ben Barka of the United Arab Socialist Republics running amok.

That’s not to mention a lengthy list of books in between then and now, and thought-provoking stories published in the usual coterie of publications. You can find more information on the author’s tenure at fan sites like this one, with lists and collections and reviews galore.

Why does a book like “The End of Everything” resonate right now?

If you’ll allow me a moment – I think that there’s a profound sense of disillusionment that translates into feeling “lost,” or that “everything” you knew is indeed ending, changing fundamentally, being transformed by the rise of a technology that we, essentially, do not control. AI is not like the personal computer, or the Internet, even. AI is different. It’s non-deterministic, and not explicitly programmed or directed by humans. There’s the black box problem, and then there’s the abdication of creativity itself to things like agentic video.

So I think that if you read the award-winning book, you’ll probably catch that vibe. We have to be careful, because in so many ways, we are inside one of those sci-fi novels – it’s just that not all of us know it yet.