It's the Late Show Potshow with Stephen Colbert.

I'm Ian McKeure. I come from London, and I'm a British novelist.

Ian, thanks for being here. You are one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed writers of our time. You are the author

of 19 novels and two short story collections. And today you are here to talk about your latest novel,

What We Can We Can We Talk About the title, What We Can Know? As the book goes on, you start thinking,

can we really know anything? What does the title mean to you?

It runs on several levels.

What we can know about the past, what we can know about the future,

and what we can know about each other,

and how difficult it is sometimes to break through even to the person closest to you. So it's a dialogue

with history, with futureology, the future of love, the future of history. In some senses,

it's, I guess, a science fiction novel without the science. I'm interested in all those things that science

fiction don't look into, like what's the future of universities, humanities, intellectual life,

artistic life, but also love, betrayal, changing circumstances through time, and getting the present and past and

future all into some kind of dialogue with each other.

How did you choose 2119, 94 years from now, as the amount of time in the future you wanted

to set this story?

I started with 400 years and then a very

good friend of mine who's one of my first readers on his first reading of an early draft said,

I think 400 years is too long. You're writing in the same

language, you know, and although you've got all kinds of explanations of why language hasn't

changed much, it would be so much more alive if it was a future that we could almost reach out

...