And at that point, I think we enter the period of maximum danger where this rising power, China, has real capability in its hands. That string of things I just described, I think, almost unquestionably will be occurring over the next 10 years. I think if you look at what's happening in China right now - the centralization of power under President Xi, the bounce that China has in their step coming out of coronavirus, the growing sense of nationalism in China, the reality of One Belt, One Road as a real geopolitical and geo-economic strategy - and then you just kind of lay the railroad tracks out, by the end of this century, what really occurs is the cyber and the artificial intelligence piece. James Stavridis: I'll take a geopolitical swing at that. But as you think about "the future" versus what the world is right now, why did setting it in 2034 become the right answer? My sense, having finished the book now, is that that was very much a deliberate choice. And instead of that, the book felt like it could happen, like, in a week. I'm curious about the world-building process here, because I started the book expecting a kind of techno-thriller, where there are autonomous drones and robots wandering through military installations. The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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The book is intended as "cautionary fiction," Stavridis said, giving the world a decade and change to figure out how to get off the path it's currently on.Īhead of the book's release, Stavridis and Ackerman joined the Source Code podcast to talk about the book, the real-world conflicts it aims to describe, the future for two of the world's most powerful countries and what war - and life - might be like in 2034.
And it feels, at many points, way too real to be comfortable. It's the story of a U.S.-China conflict that escalates too fast, that shows exactly how reliant we are on technology and that makes frighteningly clear how close we are to total destruction. What Stavridis and Ackerman came up with is " 2034: A Novel of the Next World War," which was released Tuesday. So when they teamed up to write a novel about what the next world war could look like, they had a lot of knowledge to start from. Elliot Ackerman spent eight years in the Marine Corps. Admiral James Stavridis spent decades in the Navy before retiring in 2013.