2054
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  • Published: 19 March 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241694961
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $34.99

2054

A Novel

Formats & editions
Paperback
8 Apr 2025
Tr. Paperback
19 Mar 2024
EBook
14 Mar 2024
Audiobook
14 Mar 2024
Hardback
14 Apr 2024
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From the acclaimed authors of the runaway New York Times bestseller 2034 comes an explosive work of speculative fiction set twenty years further in the future, at a moment when a radical leap forward in artificial intelligence combines with America’s violent partisan divide to create an existential threat to the country – and the world

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.
  • Published: 19 March 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241694961
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $34.99
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Praise for 2054

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

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

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

Gripping and imaginative . . . an enjoyable techno-thriller that explores the chaotic, self-destructive potential of human ingenuity

This book tells us more about the present than the future, it does so with dry wit, and offers philosophical insights into our relationship with technology . . . a satisfying combination of two very different things: "chilling vision of things to come" and "page-turning beach-read"

Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

This kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed . . . 2034 and 2054 are near-future tales, extrapolating from the present to a carefully imagined next five minutes, designed to elicit a little spark of recognition, the feeling of being shown a possible path from "here" to a utopian or dystopian "there"

Hari Kunzru, New York Times

An enjoyable, intelligent and ultimately frighteningly plausible version of a future

James Crabtree
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