This is Ian McEwan’s second foray into science fiction after his alternative history novel, Machines Like Me. I enjoyed that book but it was far too eager to show off its worldbuilding—at one point a character practically looks at the camera like Tim in The Office. There’s a bit of that in What We Can Know with its expository passages explaining what’s been happening in the 21st and 22nd centuries, but it mostly works. As with all McEwan’s work, it’s extremely English. He just has to have some clashing of the classes in there. The book has an unusual structure, switching between the present day and a climate-ravaged future one hundred years from now. A future scholar is obsessed with a poem from our time period that was never published. At times the book feels like a whodunnit, complete with all the suspects assembled together in a country house. If the structure is unusual, the tonal swings are really something. We go from high-brow pondering of the utility of art in the face of catastrophe to downright schlocky soap-opera shenanigans. My eyebrows may have gotten whiplash. But I guess it all worked somehow because I found myself turning the pages, eager to reach the final revelations. Still, there was one thing that really bothered me. In order for the plot to work, our future scholar needs to have access to emails, chats, and other digital artificats from today. We get an explanation of how the cryptography has been cracked by quantum computers, but it’s simply taken as given that the files themselves would be available, having survived in “The Cloud”. I can’t really blame Ian McEwan here; here’s just repeating the oft-retold advice that you should be careful what you put online because it’ll be there forever. But that warning simply isn’t true. The Cloud dissolves very, very quickly. Just ask the folks at the Internet Archive. But if your credulity can stretch to accept the naïvely optimistic depiction of digital preservation in What We Can Know, it’s an enjoyable romp.