In the opening chapters of “2054,” a new thriller co-written by Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis, the action shifts every page or two — from a private jet, to the White House, to a Ritz-Carlton hotel, to Capitol Hill and elsewhere. The short sections are titled with locations and time stamps (including time zones) to signify global scope and high stakes. We understand at once that this is a story too big to be told from one perspective.
It’s a familiar technique; in movies, such titles are often given extra technical sheen with a flashing cursor that prints them out across the screen, a skeuomorphic legacy of teletype and early command-line interfaces. The implication is that diverse situations are being monitored in some way, logged and recorded by a technically proficient authority that sees them as part of a coherent whole.
“2054” is a sequel to “2034,” “a novel of the next world war” that meticulously laid out a sequence of events starting with a naval confrontation in the South China Sea and ending in nuclear conflict. Twenty years afterward, Sandy Chowdhury, a character in the first novel, asks the pilot of his Gulfstream to divert so he can view the reconstruction of Galveston, Texas, which was leveled by a Chinese warhead. The physical consequences of the devastation are being repaired, but the social and political divisions remain.
The geopolitical epic is at least as old as “War and Peace,” but there’s a particular kind of novel that came into its own with globalization, taking on new life in recent years. Call it the apocalyptic systems thriller, or, because abbreviations and acronyms are crucial to its aesthetic, the A.S.T.
Multi-stranded, terse, often anchored in character just enough to drive the action forward, these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. At its best, this kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed: A butterfly flaps its wings in Seoul and the Dow crashes; a hacker steals a password and war breaks out.
The currency of the A.S.T. is plausibility. It can be counterfactual, but never fantastical. It differs from other kinds of thrillers in its willingness to indulge in essayistic digressions about technology or policy. In some cases, the story may even take second place to these ideas, a mere vehicle for the delivery of an info-payload. In this, the A.S.T. is essentially a subgenre of SF, or at least the kind of science fiction that prioritizes world-building over other kinds of narrative pleasure. Indeed, many A.S.T.s, like “2034” and “2054,” are near-future tales, extrapolating from the present to a carefully imagined next five minutes, designed to elicit a little spark of recognition, the feeling of being shown a possible path from “here” to a utopian or dystopian “there.”
“The End of October,” Lawrence Wright’s eerily prescient novel about a global influenza pandemic, was written before Covid and published in the early days of the 2020 lockdown. Like Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic drama, “Contagion,” which experienced a boom in streaming in early 2020, Wright’s book generated a lot of affect, at least in that moment, from its power of extrapolation. We were in the early days of something; we didn’t know what. Here were narratives that showed what we could be facing if the pandemic intensified to the point of mass death and social breakdown. Naturally, we could not look away.
To succeed, this kind of story has to feel true. Even as the A.S.T. indulges in thriller tropes, the chases and explosions must be anchored by a kind of epistemological authority. We must believe that what we’re reading is something more than a product of the writer’s fevered imagination. Wright, who won a Pulitzer for “The Looming Tower,” his account of 9/11, derives his authority from extensive and rigorous research. In the acknowledgments (always an important part of an A.S.T.) he credits virologists and public health officials, as well as a number of submariners, who helped with an extended sequence that takes place aboard one of the U.S. Navy’s long-range underwater vessels.
Ackerman and Stavridis derive their authority from their military experience. Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine. Stavridis retired as a four-star admiral and served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe. When they’re describing the buildup to war in “2034,” their procedural knowledge gives their story a verisimilitude that elevates its workmanlike telling. As Navy men, they are not above a little light trolling of the other branches of the armed forces: How else are we to understand a novel about World War III without a single mention (as far as I’m able to tell) of the Army?
The interwoven character arcs of “2034” convey what really seems to interest the authors — a set of warnings and predictions aimed at their peers in what used to be called the military-industrial complex. The ladder of escalation begins with a Chinese demonstration of decisive cyberwar superiority, a capability gap that leads to disaster. The vulnerability of global communications systems is a preoccupation, as is the rise of India as a military power. The important theaters of war are naval ones — the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. So maybe that’s where military spending ought to be directed? Just a thought from the admiral.
The sequel, however, turns its attention to biotechnology and American domestic partisanship. The president dies suddenly from a mysterious growth on his heart, raising fears of a new kind of bioweapon based on “remote gene editing” technology. His death leads to civil unrest, and takes a motley crew of characters, including Chowdhury, a genetics researcher and a seductive diving instructor, through an eccentric riff on “Heart of Darkness.” They head upriver to find a reclusive figure — not Kurtz, but a centenarian Ray Kurzweil, the ebullient (and real) Silicon Valley futurist and promoter of transhumanism. The future of humanity will be decided in the lab, the authors caution, and we are sorely unprepared.
Experts on military matters, Ackerman and Stavridis are much less secure on scientific terrain. Their notion of the world-changing “singularity,” drawn from Kurzweil, is little more than metaphysical hand-waving, and their descriptions of biotechnology lack substance, which drains their tale of the most important quality of any A.S.T.: procedural plausibility.
The most celebrated example of the A.S.T. in recent years — and the book that, in its breadth of speculation, sets the standard for the genre — is Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” which attempts the enormous task of imagining a coordinated global response to another grave threat to humanity, climate change. From its terrifying opening set piece, which portrays a lethal heat event in north India, it expands across the globe and through decades, laying out strategies for alleviating the crisis. Along the way, the story is studded by capsule essays on a range of technical topics, from the Gini Coefficient and tax policy to carbon sequestration and the Jevons Paradox.
This is fiction as simulation, running versions of events, trying to imagine how things might be if the pieces on the board were arranged in a certain way, rather than playing the other games novelists play, imagining what could never be or simply never was. One ancestor of this kind of work is the 19th-century social novel: Think of Zola’s meticulously researched Rougon-Macquart sequence, a 20-book panorama of life under the French Second Empire. A more recent predecessor is the near-future cyberpunk narrative exemplified by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Still another would be the kind of techno-thriller pioneered by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, particularly the spate of novels published late in the Cold War, including Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” and Gen. Sir John Hackett’s “The Third World War,” which imagined hostilities between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But there’s a different tradition behind the A.S.T., one outside conventional literary history — corporate scenario planning.
During the Cold War, one think tank was central to the business of imagining the American future. The RAND Corporation had been spun out of the Department of War to produce policy proposals for the U.S. government. It used game theory to model nuclear escalation and collected what would now be called “big data” (in retrospect, woefully small) to guide the conduct of the Vietnam War. A RAND futurist called Herman Kahn began to supplement mathematical models with what he termed “scenarios,” war-game narratives illustrating “rungs of the escalation ladder” of nuclear conflict, from “ostensible crisis” through “justifiable counterforce attack” to “spasm or insensate war.” The storytelling element was a daring innovation in an organizational culture that valued quantitative analysis.
In the early 1970s, the oil company Royal Dutch Shell hired the Frenchman Pierre Wack to run its strategic planning department. A disciple of Kahn, Wack was also an early corporate adopter of “mindfulness” and a student of the Caucasian mystic George Gurdjieff. Wack made scenario planning a kind of structured science fiction, producing not a single forecast but several competing images of the future. Participants were encouraged to step away from the “official future” — whatever the orthodoxy might be in their organization.
Wack’s scenario planning was credited with helping Shell weather the oil shocks of the ’70s, and this style of “possible future” storytelling gradually spread beyond the company, finding fertile ground in the emerging Bay Area tech scene. By the 1990s, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, was a partner in a scenario planning consultancy. Wired magazine ran a “scenarios” issue in 1995, detailing possible futures imagined by writers of speculative fiction like Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and Douglas Coupland, completing the fusion of scenario planning with more traditional literary pursuits.
So, while the A.S.T. is a form of entertainment, it’s also meant to enlighten the planners and decision makers who might grab a hardcover off the shelf at an airport bookstore. Bill Gates and Barack Obama have recommended “The Ministry for the Future.” Robinson spoke at the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos. Stavridis and Ackerman have spoken at think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. As fiction for the Davos set, the A.S.T. is a tool for both forecasting and navigating the troubles to come.
This dual purpose is made particularly clear in “AI 2041,” a recent book by Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, and Chen Qiufan, one of China’s most celebrated SF writers. In it, Chen writes 10 short stories, each illustrating a scenario that Lee wants to discuss. Lee introduces the stories and writes an extensive commentary after each one, detailing the technological possibilities and social issues that it raises. Chen’s fictions are rather swamped by Lee’s context, which makes them into something like moral fables, mere illustrations of his points.
Why is the A.S.T. so salient right now? What itch is it scratching? One of the most astute thinkers about the emergent networked future is the design theorist Benjamin Bratton. In “The Revenge of the Real,” a work of nonfiction published in 2021, he proposes a “politics for a post-pandemic world,” suggesting that Covid has trained us to see ourselves in an “epidemiological” way: Like it or not, we are, inescapably, a population as well as individuals. We have undergone a kind of crash course in systems thinking that will, Bratton hopes, force us to approach our problems at global scale. “It is necessary,” he writes, “for a society to be able to sense, model and act back upon itself, and it is necessary for it to plan and provide for the care of its people.”
The aesthetic of the A.S.T., with its flaunting of globalization, its pleasure in technical advances and its refusal of the “single window” into its stories, does have a utopian dimension — the imagination of what Bratton calls “planetary competency.” The message is one of resilience, of human beings acting in concert, muddling through problems in the hope of navigating what Pierre Wack called “the rapids” of the near future, into calmer waters beyond.
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