Here’s an opener for you: “On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough…” Ian McEwan describes his new novel as science fiction without the science. We’re in the 22nd century, nearly 100 years from now. The world is much altered, as a result of climate change, nuclear wars and massive tsunamis, the latter caused by the explosion of a Russian bomb in the middle of the Atlantic in 2042. Three-quarters of species have vanished.
Civil war rages in what’s left of America. Britain is now an archipelago of small islands, without industry or fossil fuels, its population halved and impoverished. People get about on wooden bikes and electric boats and eat miserable “protein cakes”. Life expectancy is down to 62. Yet civilisation continues, in a stultified, reduced form.
