How to keep fiction fictitious

How do nations sleepwalk into war? Often through lack of imagination.

That is the thesis that impelled Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO supreme commander, and Elliot Ackerman, a prominent fiction writer and decorated Marine veteran, to write “2034: A Novel of the Next World War.”

The new novel envisions how the United States and China could blunder into a nuclear conflict, propelled by Chinese nationalism, American hubris, and a U.S. failure to grasp the extent of Chinese advances in cyber-warfare.

At a time when the world is changing with a rapidity few of us foresaw—including a pandemic and U.S. internal conflicts—it seems hard to predict what next year will look like.

Yet, as this novel makes clear, it’s never been more important for Americans to fully grasp the danger of deteriorating relations between a still powerful USA and a rapidly rising China—a reality often lost in our hyper partisan political debates.

It’s not that military and think tank experts aren’t discussing potential military conflicts with China, but Americans haven’t thought through the consequences.

So Ackerman and Stavridis chose to write a character-driven novel that veers between the old American military ethos of the 20th century and the uncertainties of the present.

It also hones in on Chinese officials who underestimate the consequences of using powerful new cyberweapons to render U.S. ships and planes defenseless. Things escalate from there. For Stavridis, the book carries on the tradition of the cautionary fiction of post-WWII novels like “Fail Safe” and “On the Beach” that imagined nuclear war with the Soviet Union. But the difference between now and then is that Americans knew what the horrors of nuclear war looked like, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That impelled Moscow and Washington to design systems to prevent the next one.

That public awareness is missing when it comes to China, which dwarfs the former Soviet Union in population and power. Beijing is developing new technologies that will make it a peer competitor with the U.S. in coming decades.

Ackerman, who was awarded the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for valor, said, “I’m drawing these characters from knowledge of the human cost of war.” America still has not finished the “late empire wars” he fought in.

The biggest theme of the book, he says, is “We have to avoid this war [with China] . . . . We have anesthetized ourselves to war, thinking it won’t be that bad and will be over by Christmas. But maybe we don’t have the technological dominance.”

He hopes the novel will inspire an “act of imagination [that] is a good inoculation to what war would look like.”

Amen.