2034 (2021) by Elliot Ackerman

Book Review

2034: A Novel of the Next World War (2021)

by Elliot Ackerman

   I think I plucked this Audiobook straight from the New York Times best-seller list (which is, at the best of times, a wasteland for literary fiction.)  Elliot Ackerman is an interesting American author with a military background and several well-received works of literary fiction centering on military-middle-eastern themes- no hits, though.  2034 is a hit, and it no doubt represents an exciting breakthrough for Ackerman, even if he had to co-author this book with some Admiral (who is actually the author interviewed at the end of the Audiobook I listened to on the Libby library app.)  The Amazon  product page has over 6,000 customer reviews which is larger by a "zero" than what even a succesful work of literary fiction is likely to get. 

   Which is not to say that 2034 is a work of literary fiction.  I think it's closer to what you would call an international political thriller with the thrill replaced by the agonizing dread of the seemingly inevitable march towards a so-called "tactical" nuclear war between the US and China, basically over Taiwan, in the end, though the series of provocations leading up to the war is what takes up most of the book.  The road to war, if you will.   The Americans, Chinese, Indians, Iranians and Russians each get their own narrators, America, of course, gets two- an Indian-American foreign policy expert working for the President and a gung-ho top gun pilot who ends up with the job of nuking Shanghai. 

  Obviously, the idea behind writing this book is to avoid the dire future (Bye San Diego! Bye Galveston!) foretold, and personally, my take-away is that we need to let China have Taiwan and the South China Sea.  They want it, they should have it, why would try to stop them?  If they showed up off the coast of San Diego and started telling us what to do in the Pacific Ocean out there past Mexico you can bet we'd be pissed. 

  My own obsersavtion about China and their geo-political aims is that they have literally, in several thousand years of civilization, had an expansionary outlook for about fifty years.  Other than that they have been concerned with their traditional land area in Asia.   Even if we let them have literally everything they want they would literally not be a threat to our actual country. Compare that to 20th century nemesii like Nazi Germany of Soviet Russia, both of which actually possessed ideologies that paid lip service to world domination.