Description

‘A pacy, gripping page-turner of a thriller . . . Don’t venture into the future without having read this book’ Andrew Roberts

From the acclaimed authors of the runaway New York Times bestseller 2034 comes an explosive work of speculative fiction about a radical leap forward in artificial intelligence that combines with America’s violent partisan divide to create an existential threat to the country – and the world.

The year is 2054. It is twenty years after the nuclear war between the United States and China that brought down the old American political order. The new American Dream Party has emerged in the US and held power for over a decade. Many fear the president will stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After a flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories spread like wildfire and the country descends into civil war.

A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence and business have a fairly good idea what happened. All signs point to a profound breakthrough in AI, of which the remote assassination of an American president is hardly the most game-changing ramification. The trail leads to an outpost in the Amazon rainforest: the last known whereabouts of the tech visionary who predicted this breakthrough. As some of the world’s great powers – old and new, state and nonstate alike – struggle to outmanoeuvre one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of democracy itself.

Combining a deep understanding of AI, biotech and the possibility of a coming singularity, along with their signature geopolitical sophistication, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis have once again written a visionary work. 2054 is a novel that reads like a thriller even as it demands that we consider the trajectory of our society and its potentially calamitous destination.

‘A satisfying combination of two very different things: “chilling vision of things to come” and “page-turning beach-read”‘ Daily Telegraph

Publisher Review

As well as being a pacy, gripping page-turner of a thriller, 2054 has the advantage of being written by two men who have seen the future, and have thought profoundly about it. It would make a sensational sci-fi movie, with powerful modern-day overtones. Don’t venture into the future without having read this book — Andrew Roberts 2054 is a compelling, terrifying and totally plausible thriller of future world history and calamity – not so far away – crafted into a sophisticated geopolitical narrative superbly handled by this unique partnership of retired admiral/NATO supremo, and a prize-winning literary writer of beautiful novels who also happens to be a decorated Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excellent – and a worthy sequel of their thriller 2034 — Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History In 2054, the US President dies unexpectedly, the ‘Dreamers’ and ‘Truthers’ are at odds across America and a second Civil War beckons. A terrifying glimpse into the near future — Lawrence James Another top-shelf thriller about near-future geopolitical turmoil . . . Ackerman and Stavridis paint a sweeping and resonant portrait of a world faced with a powerful technological advancement it doesn’t fully understand. The results are genuinely chilling * Publishers Weekly *