There was once a time when we didn’t think a global pandemic was possible in the 21st century. The events of 9/11 took us by surprise as they did at Pearl Harbor and Midway.

Yet all of these tragic events were imaginable and some aspects of them even made their way into fiction, long before they happened.

They remind us that events like a pandemic or a world war are mostly at core, a failure of human imagination. Imagination which should be our first line of defense in preparing for our eventual future.

That is what distinguished Admiral James Stavridis and former Marine and award winning author Elliot Ackerman have given us in 2034: A Novel of the Next World War 

My conversation with Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman: