Southerners do love their Nascar, but going to war to defend their rights to gas up a muscle car? All of Florida? And the wall around South Carolina - where have we heard this before? Were the residents of South Carolina perhaps made to pay for it? There’s a fair amount of authorial winking and seat-of-the-pants science going on here, but never mind El Akkad is far less concerned with the mechanics of his conceit than its psychological underpinnings. Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia secede to form the Free Southern State South Carolina, which led the revolt, is encased by a massive wall after the federal government unleashes the first of the novel’s two plagues to tamp down the rebellion. (The federal government has relocated to Columbus, Ohio, a nice touch.) When, in the face of environmental catastrophe, fossil fuel is outlawed, the country goes bonkers. Climate change has occurred on a massive, unanticipated scale many coastal cities are gone, as well as virtually all of peninsular Florida. When the story reboots in 2075, Sarat is a young girl living with her family in a shipping container in a mostly drowned Louisiana.

Chestnut, known as Sarat, who is the novel’s true subject. The “she” he speaks of is his aunt, Sara T. Our worries may have evolved since then, but not the impulse to enact them on the page, and Omar El Akkad’s “American War” is a disturbingly plausible case in point - a tale of a future America torn asunder by its own political and tribal affiliations.Ĭredit. From Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach” to Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon” to the apocalyptic kitsch of “Planet of the Apes” (confession: I sat through all five in a row at an “Apes” film festival in 1975), the message was the same: Fellow humans, we blew it. (I often wish Orwell had stuck with his original title, “The Last Man in Europe,” so that more readers might encounter it later in life and appreciate its complexity.) Likewise did the Cold War produce a bountiful literature of white-knuckle nuclear prediction. In the modern era, the granddaddy of such books is Orwell’s “1984,” a novel sentenced forever by its prognosticatory title to high school reading lists across the English-speaking world.

Nationalistic movements blooming across Europe, sectarian violence roiling the Middle East, vast refugee populations on the move, chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island calving into the sea - and now, to top it all off, you-know-who, padding around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in his pajamas with his thumb on the “tweet” button: How tempting it is, in these fraught and fractious times, to view any dystopian novel as a kind of nonfiction in waiting, a pre-journalism of the future.

American war by omar el akkad