2054 — a sci-fi novel on the age of ‘non-order’

Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis have followed their cyber page-turner 2034 with an equally propulsive biotech thriller.

America and Britain recently accused hackers linked to China of an array of cyber attacks. In response the US launched sanctions against figures linked to APT31 — or Advanced Persistent Threat Group 31 — a shadowy cyber outfit it claimed acted as a front for Beijing’s espionage services.

As alarming as this sounds, cyber attacks by murky foreign actors are a common and fairly well-understood threat, for all that they could have catastrophic consequences. But they raise a broader question: how should governments identify threats posed by cutting-edge new technologies?

Here fiction can play an intriguing role. During the war on terror, the US Department of Homeland Security asked an array of science fiction authors to take part in an exercise in which they brainstormed possible future threats. (France ran a similar exercise.) Sometimes novels or pacy thrillers can sound the alarm via imaginative foretelling of looming disasters.

One such example was 2034 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis. A page-turner from 2021, this began with a new Chinese cyber weapon capable of disabling electrical equipment around the world, and concluded in a brutal war over Taiwan in 2034 (hence the title). The result was bleak: a nuclear conflict between the US and China that saw cities wiped out and millions dead.