At a Politics and Prose event earlier this year, authors Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis were interviewed by Martha Raddatz. They had a rich conversation about their book, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War.
Watch the conversation below:
(Check out more from Politics and Prose here.)
Some Highlights From the Conversation:
Elliot Ackerman: “We were, very early on, in total alignment that we wanted this to be a character driven novel that was both global in its reach — you’re traveling everywhere — but intimate in that you’re traveling to all these places with a pretty well-developed set of characters.”
“Partisanship presents a national security threat.”
Admiral James Stavridis: “What we tried to do with this novel is to imagine our way into this future and talk realistically about where we think in 15 years the military term alert, correlation of forces will be. In other words, how will the two sides be balanced. The short answer is we don’t know, but my guess is that China will advance rapidly, in cyber, in quantum computing, in A.I. And therefore, will be able to leverage new stealth technologies, etc, etc, etc. I think the United States has some work to do to keep up. We’re still slightly ahead but if you kind of follow those threat lines along and you consider nationalism and look at demographics and polarization in this country it starts to look like there is a moment of real danger about 15 years from now…. If anything, we hope [2034] is a cautionary tale that allows us to reverse engineer what’s happening and think our way through how do we avoid it.”
“This is not predictive fiction. This is cautionary fiction.”
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Politics for the People Zoom Event
With Authors Elliot Ackerman
and Admiral James Stavridis
Thursday, August 12th at 2pm ET
CLICK HERE TO RSVP!
