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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.
Now the authors have dreamt up 2054, an equally propulsive thriller played out in a world of advanced biotechnology and quantum computing. Set two decades after its predecessor, the new book imagines a changed, authoritarian America that has barely recovered from its war with China.
US president Ángel Castro is planning his fourth term as the head of the American Dream party, or “Dreamers”. The opposition Democratic-Republicans — or “Truthers” — fret about the US sliding into totalitarianism. Castro then suddenly collapses and dies during a speech. What at first seems accidental turns out to have been an assassination by a foreign power, using remote gene-editing technologies.
These techniques — the “holy grail of biotech” — allow genetic improvements to be made remotely with “the ease of a software update”. They enable instant bio-hacks to cure diseases, stop pandemics — or take out world leaders.
2054 is interesting in part for its unusual co-authors. Ackerman is a novelist and military veteran, and one presumes is responsible for the book’s rapid pace and clear structure. Stavridis is a retired admiral and former Nato commander who brings a sense of geopolitical realism and in-depth knowledge of government processes.
As with any science fiction, the world they create is interesting for its quirky imagination of the future. Characters communicate via “headsUp” retina displays and take suborbital flights that zip between the US and China in three hours.
Lurking behind all this is the “singularity”, a radical notion about a tipping point of human technological fusion popularised by author Ray Kurzweil, who appears in the book in a minor role.
“We’d witness advances like mind-uploading,” one character explains of the moment when the singularity arrives. “Once uploaded, that chip could be fused with a quantum computer that couples biological with artificial intelligence . . . You’d have the mind of God.”
As with its predecessor, 2054 describes a new and unsettling multipolar geopolitical order — or, more appropriately, “non-order”. America is exhausted and divided; China worn down by “near-world-ending conflict”. Others have risen in their place. Nigeria is a major player, as is Japan, which has re-emerged as a technological force. Europe barely features.
2054 is far from great literature. Its characters, such as they are, speak mostly in exposition. The Trumpian overtones of its focus on “Truthers” can feel less than subtle. Yet as with their first work, the authors have created an enjoyable, intelligent and ultimately frighteningly plausible vision of a future replete with new technological threats. As they write: “The Great Game being played in biotech, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing had come to define foreign policy as nations aligned with one another in pursuit of the Singularity.”
As Ackerman and Stavridis try to understand the grave threats posed today by cyber hackers such as APT31, leaders in Washington and elsewhere would do worse than pick up a novel to figure out the nightmare scenarios that just might be coming next.
2054: A Novel, by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, Penguin Press $28/ Viking £18.99, 304 pages
James Crabtree is the author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’
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