American War is the second dystopian novel, I have reviewed this year. There just seems to be something about 2017 that makes it hard to believe our civilization has a bright future. While Station Eleven focused on a single apocalyptic incident, the spread of a super bug that kills most of humanity, American War offers up a cornucopia of misery. The novel envisions a near future for the United States that includes massive human displacement from global warming, the banning of fossil fuels, an American civil war, not one but two human-engineered plagues, and monstrous out-of-control war machines that randomly rain death from the skies.
I believe that speculative fiction can be most powerful when it provides a portal to view our current issues from a new perspective. It can provide insights into the potential consequences of our actions by showing intelligent alien life or people from the future looking back on our follies. It can also question our assumptions about deeply ingrained cultural beliefs by presenting similar behaviours but in a different context, like the 1969 Star Trek episode "Let that be your last battlefield," that explored the madness of racism. American War provides so many opportunities to reframe our awareness it can be almost dizzying to establish the main takeaway.
The timeframe of the novel focuses on 2074 to 2095, the years of the Second American Civil War. Much of the country has already been ravaged by climate change: coastal regions are underwater, farmland is parched, and the political and economic centre of the country has moved to the midwest. Civil war is triggered when the northern states try to impose a national ban on the use of fossil fuels, and the south rises up in defiance. The story follows the members of one family who find themselves caught in the dangerous and soul-destroying business of trying to be civilians in the midst of war.
The novel is richly layered. We not only must contemplate the impact of our current actions on climate change, but how we are responding to the international refugee crisis. In El Akkad's future the Middle East forms a stable empire (after the fifth Arab uprising) and Americans and Europeans are fleeing their homes for safety and opportunity. Throughout, the war feels like any one of America's proxy wars being fought currently in the Middle East or thirty years ago in Central America. Small dirty wars, orchestrated from abroad, and intending to create maximum chaos to destabilize the region. It leaves one with a sense of how it must feel when your home becomes the battlefield for some other nation's ambition.
But it is also about the impact of war on the human psyche: how propaganda and the constant need for revenge fuels war, how tribalism springs from conflict and how children raised in a refugee camp can easily be manipulated to assert their place in the world.
In some ways, American War feels prophetic while simultaneously feeling out of date. It was published in April 2017, and although it predicts many of the fault lines broken open with the Trump administration, it also seems to miss some of the major themes. For example, by October 2017, the the only thing that feels implausible about a second American Civil War, is that it would take so long to break out. 2074 is over fifty years from now. Also the novel is strangely silent on the issue of race. In light of the recent resurgence of blatant white supremacy, it is hard to imagine a future civil war between the north and the south where race would not be a triggering issue. Reading American War actually makes me feel nostalgic for the lovely innocence of 2016, when we still believed that the President of the United States could be trusted to denounce the actions of Neo-Nazis.
The vision El Akkad offers of the future is bleak and provides little space for the reader to imagine redemption, either personal, political or global. Yet for those who are willing to contemplate the potential consequences of our actions and to imagine their world transformed from one of privilege to marginalization, American War will both provoke and enlighten.
Four smileys out of five: 😀😀😀😀
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