Through her diaries we learn of the next twenty years. The book’s ostensible narrator, a historian writing in the twenty-second century, has possession of the diaries of Sarat Chestnut, our heroine, who was only 6 years old in 2075. There is still fighting in East Texas, and the state of South Carolina, infected with a kind of sleeping sickness, literally has a wall around it to keep it quarantined.

In the confusion, Mexico has retaken its historical territory, right up to the Oregon border. Maps included in the book add verisimilitude to this highly speculative novel. It was understood that “You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.” This way, “the war will never end.”īut in 2075 the territory now known as FSS, the Free Southern States, also known as MAG-Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, capitol in Atlanta, is surrounded and can only launch raids, guerilla strikes against the USA. There is actually a Reunification Treaty being forged, slowly because the South insists it include clauses on “courage in the face of aggression” and the “protection of long-cherished ways of living.” On Octothe South seceded, again, fought, again, and lost again.

Fossil fuels, like the cotton of the first Civil War, were a major export and source of wealth. The Deep South refused to go along with this, refused to give up the oil and gas industry. When it became clear they were warming the planet, the federal government, now located, of necessity, in Columbus, Ohio, banned fossil fuels. The worlds of “1984” or “Brave New World” look Edenic by comparison.Īnd, there has been another American Civil War. In the South, some food is grown in vertical farms, hydroponic and controlled. The weather is so warm, the soil so baked, that almost nothing will grow south of Tennessee. Augusta is now the port city for Georgia. There is no more New Orleans, there are no Florida Keys, no Miami, in fact no Florida at all. Global warming has caused the seas to rise. Quickly we learn that the situation is dire. His chilling, convincing debut novel, “American War,” opens in the year 2075 in Louisiana. He has had a vision of our future and it is not pretty. He covered the Arab Spring in Egypt and reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Ferguson, Missouri. International journalist Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, raised from age 6-16 in Qatar, then moved to Canada where he worked for “The Globe and Mail” for ten years.

American war omar akkad