Ian McEwan's next novel, 'What We Can Know,' is science fiction 'without the science'

NEW YORK — The next novel by Ian McEwan will be a post-apocalyptic story, set in part in the 22nd century and centered on a scholar's immersion into a poem written during happier times.

McEwan, the Booker Prize-winning British author, is calling ''What We Can Know'' a work of science fiction ''without the science."

''I've written a novel about a quest, a crime, revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry, and how, through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving," McEwan said in a statement released Friday through Alfred A. Knopf, which announced the book will be published Sept. 16.

"In our times, we know more about the world than we ever did, and such knowledge will be hard to erase. My ambition in this novel was to let the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time.''

The 76-year-old McEwan has previously imagined disasters and disruptions — and how we respond — whether the threat of climate change in ''Solar,'' a radiation cloud in ''Lessons'' or artificial intelligence in ''Machines Like Me.'' Knopf publisher and editor-in-chief Jordan Pavlin said in a statement that ''What We Can Know'' is an exploration of the ''limits of our knowledge," whether of other people or the arc of the past.

''As the title suggests, the book calls into question the limits of our knowledge about our most intimate companions, and about history itself,'' Pavlin said. ''How many irrecoverable secrets and stories are lost to the past? McEwan's genius in this novel is to recover, in an exquisite feat of storytelling, a long-lost secret.''