Ian McEwan
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Ian McEwan earns The Visionary through fiction that operates as structured thought experiment about civilisational futures. His novel imagines a tsunamied, archipelago Britain a century hence, deployed not as dystopia but as a lens on what is irreducibly human: consciousness, embodied experience, even the marital tiff in Homer. AI, nuclear drift, and climate collapse are framed by one integrating question, what survives, and what that survival reveals about us. That is visionary leadership by narrative means.
“I want it to hold up a mirror to us finally. That it might help us actually work out what the essence of being human is. And what we want.”
“It hasn't fallen in love, it hasn't caught cancer, it hasn't broken a leg skiing irresponsibly at the age of 17 — all the things that cumulatively make us. It doesn't know what it is to be asked.”
“My biggest hope about the 21st century is my most reasonable hope. We'll scrape through, and there will be disasters and catastrophes along the way, and we might disrupt ourselves so much that a kind of peace will descend.”
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “Ian McEwan: what gives renowned author hope in an age of crisis?”
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