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.
Always run, never fight. Preserve the knowledge. Survive at all costs. Take them to the stars.
Germany, 1945. Mia, a nineteen-year-old girl, is sent by the OSS to find Wernher von Braun. Her mission: stop the Russians getting hold of Germany's - and the world's - foremost rocket scientist. Von Braun is suspicious. And so he should be. For Mia is no ordinary girl. She only looks human. And helping the Allies win the Second World War is only one part of her plan. Because there's an even darker conflict taking place on Earth. A secret struggle thousands of years old that has engulfed and taken generations of Mia's people. Can the firing of rockets finally bring about its end? Will Mia, as the last of her kind, bring the stars down to Earth? And if she succeeds, what will happen to us?
'Clever and compelling, it will keep you enthralled until the end' Robert J. Sawyer
'Highly crafted and unique' Library Journal
The first book in the Take Them To The Stars trilogy.
ISBN 9781405945530