Asking the Wrong Questions

It's been a long time since I read a novel by Ian McEwan. Some combination of his dwindling reputation among readers in my general vicinity, and plot descriptions that I found unappetizing kept me away from an author who was once one of my gateways to literary fiction. What We Can Know , the 2025 novel through which I've chosen to become reacquainted with McEwan, is a potent reminder of the skill and artistry that once made him a must-read. It is also extremely strange. Its first half is one of the most exciting pieces of writing I've read in months, but the novel only works with its second half, which completely changes what it is and what it's about. The first half of What We Can Know is narrated by Tom, an academic in the early 22nd century. Tom's specialty is literature published between 1990 and 2030, a period known as The Derangement, when runaway technological innovation overshadowed looming climate catastrophe. In the novel's opening chapters, we follow...

In the opening sentences of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay , a spaceship breaks up in orbit over an alien planet, spilling stasis pods whose inhabitants are resuscitated mid-crash, waking to panic and pandemonium as they tumble uncontrollably towards the planet. Some of the resuscitations fail; some of the pods are smashed by debris; some of their chutes fail to deploy. It's a familiar scene, for all its drama; a classic opening of any number of science fiction stories that drop their protagonists into a crisis and then let them work out their survival and the rest of their story from there. But as our narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev, explains—from his vantage point in one of the descending pods, albeit one that makes it to the planet's surface more or less intact—this is not an accident, but the system operating as designed. The ship is carrying convicts to a labor camp. It has been built to survive the journey and no more. Dumping the prisoners out in space, terrifying...

Well, hot damn. I actually wasn't keen on the idea of a sequel to 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse . The first film was so remarkable, so brilliant on so many different levels, that it seemed impossible for its achievement to be reproduced. I wasn't eager to watch it transformed, like so many other exceptional pop culture events, into fodder for endless sequels and imitations—especially since the latter happened almost immediately, with Hollywood instantly embracing the film's most notable innovations, its deliberately skewed, not-entirely-realistic animation style, and the idea of the multiverse, both of which have become almost ubiquitous in a mere five years. A Spider-Verse sequel, I thought, couldn't help but feel like it was playing catch-up with the film's own imitators. So I guess that's me told, then, because Across the Spider-Verse is simply stunning. It's not just a step forward from the original film in practically every respect, but...