Is this Booker Prize winner really that good?

Two dystopian novels published in 2023, within a few months of each other, attracted my attention — one by an Irish writer who has found international fame, and the other by an English writer who has yet to find such acclaim: Paul Lynch whose ‘Prophet Song’ won the 2023 Booker Prize, and Tim Bragg whose latest novel is ‘The Mirror’. It’s instructive to compare the two works.

Dystopian and apocalyptic fiction has a long history, perhaps founded in ancient archetypal myth and legend and grim Biblical prophecies about future times when the human race will suffer severe social upheaval and global cataclysm.

Its popularity has been partly due to the growth in interest in science fiction, but it can also be categorised along with allegory and speculative fiction. And rapid social change on technological, ideological, environmental and demographic fronts has raised an awareness of future trends, creating sub-genres such as ‘ecotopian’ and climate and feminist dystopian fiction.

Probably, one could make a case for science fiction being the most important literary genre, in terms of the way in which it can deal with the ‘big picture’ of humanity and questions of the potential and development of the human race.

The famous science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke argued that science fiction, more than…