Literary mystery meets dystopian future in Ian McEwan’s ‘What We Can Know’

LONDON (AP) — When novelists look to the future, the view is often grim. There are a lot more fictional dystopias than utopias.

Ian McEwan has good news and bad news about what lies ahead in “ What We Can Know,” a book he calls “science fiction without the science.”

The British author’s 19th novel, published Tuesday in the U.S. by Knopf, is set in 2119 and follows a professor of literature researching a famed 21st-century poet and his circle.

So far, so cozy. But it’s a world in which nuclear war, pandemics, economic collapse and climate change — a period known as The Derangement — have halved the global population. The United States is a lawless land of feuding warlords. Nigeria is the global superpower. Inundated England has been reduced to a string of small island republics.

McEwan,