Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know isn’t even out yet, and already someone has spotted a goof. In response to an early review in a Sunday paper – which reports that McEwan’s novel is set in a world where a Russian hydrogen bomb has missed its target in the United States, exploded in the Atlantic and “flooded three continents” – the science fiction writer Charles Stross pointed out drily on social media that “if you can flood three continents with a single H-bomb in the Atlantic, that bomb is rather more powerful than all the nuclear weapons we, as a species, ever manufactured, multiplied by some factor with too many zeroes appended”.

When you write “big boom, giant tsunami”, most readers will buy it and go along for the ride

This is a good and rather a funny point – assuming the r

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