We're going to see more unmanned, more hypersonic movement.

Lasers will be a big part of this.

That's real.

The only thing you can really bet on is change.

Change in innovation of weapons.

Change in the way the planet is going to look and also change in geopolitical alliances.

The year is 2084. The U.S. and China are close allies, along with Florida, because Florida

has seceded from the Union and is now an independent republic. Meanwhile, mass migration

driven by climate change is redefining nation states the world over.

A cautionary tale written by a Marine Corps veteran and a former Supreme Allied commander of NATO.

This is sources and methods from NPR.

I'm Mary Louise Kelly. That vision of the future you just heard is fiction, the plot of

2084, a new novel. The authors are former Marine Elliott Akraman, who did multiple tours in Iraq and

Afghanistan, and Jim Stavridis, retired four-star admiral and commander of NATO.

They compare their work to Cold War fiction, like Dr. Strangelove,

stories that envisioned disasters, specifically so society would work to avoid them.

Their past books include 2034 and 2054, set in those years. The first sees the U.S. at war with China. The second focuses on AI and civil unrest in the United States. Their latest, 2084, wraps up a trilogy.

Elliot Ackerman and Jim Stavridis are here to talk about it. Hey, you two. Welcome to sources and methods.

Thanks, Mary Louise. Yeah, thank you. So, again, your first book was 2034. Then you skipped ahead 20 years to 2054. So my first question, I'll steer this to you, Admiral. What happened to 2074? Why skip ahead by 30?

Well, what happened is we wanted a little bit of an homage to 1984,

because the novel 1984 was a work of cautionary fiction.

All three of these books are designed to alert the reader to real dangers unfolding in the 21st century so we can avoid them.

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