Join Ocean House owner, actor, and bestselling author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with New York Times bestselling authors and mother/son duo Elliott Ackerman and Joanna Leedom-Ackerman. They discuss their books: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman’s The Far Side of the Desert and Elliott Ackerman’s 2054. About the Authors: Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, Green on Blue, and the memoirs The Fifth Act and Places and Names. His books have been nominated for numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a Marine veteran, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. About 2054: From the acclaimed authors of the runaway New York Times bestseller 2034 comes another 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 It is twenty years after the catastrophic war between the United States and China that brought down the old American political order. A new party has emerged in the US, holding power for over a decade. Efforts to cement its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media but is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he’ll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war. A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence, and business have a fairly good idea of 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 outmaneuver one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of American democracy. 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. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include Burning Distance, The Dark Path to the River, and No Marble Angels. She has published PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line and was the editor for The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate. Former International Secretary of PEN International, she is a Vice President of PEN International and a former board member and Vice President of PEN American Center. She serves on the boards of Refugees International, the International Center for Journalists, the American Writers Museum, and Words Without Borders and is an emeritus director of Poets and Writers, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and Human Rights Watch and an emeritus trustee of Brown University and Johns Hopkins University. Joanne is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Institute of Letters. A former The Christian Science Monitor reporter, Joanne has taught writing at New York University, City University of New York, Occidental College, and the University of California at Los Angeles extension. About The Far Side of the Desert: A terrorist attack—a kidnapping—the ultimate vacation gone wrong Sisters Samantha and Monte Waters are vacationing together in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, enjoying a festival and planning to meet with their brother, Cal—but the idyllic plans are short-lived. When terrorists’ attacks rock the city around them, Monte, a U.S. foreign service officer, and Samantha, an international television correspondent, are separated, and one of them is whisked away in the frenzy. The family mobilizes, using all their contacts to try to find their missing sister, but to no avail. She has vanished. As time presses on, the outlook darkens. Can she be found, or is she a lost cause? And, even if she returns, will the damage to her and those around her be irreparable? Moving from Spain to Washington to Morocco to Gibraltar to the Sahara Desert, ...
