“he old dynamics of power now inverted,” El Akkad’s brought the war we associate with the Middle East of today home to roost in the America of tomorrow. All the same, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have refused to stop using fossil fuels, instead seceding the union and inciting the battle that’s tearing the country apart.
Florida has disappeared underwater, Louisiana is following, and great arid plains of southern land are no longer fit for agriculture. America is also suffering the catastrophic results of global warming. However intriguing to us British readers, these details are just the backdrop for El Akkad’s tale. The Mediterranean is still awash with migrants looking for better lives, but now these “fleets of ragged little boats” head “southwards from the European shore”, not north towards it. The old Middle Eastern regimes have finally fallen and in their place a new empire – the Bouazizi – has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes, a superpower fuelled and financed by fields of solar panels stretching across what used to be known as the Arabian Peninsular, now too hot for human habitation. Minor gripes regarding occasionally histrionic dialogue or forced plotting aside, what sets this impressive book apart from other dystopian novels is the fully realised plausibility of the scenario El Akkad has created, the roots of which can be all too easily identified in the world around us today.Ĭlimate change and political uprisings have changed the map. The novel imagines a second American Civil War, that rages from 2074 to 2095, telling the story of the conflict via a combination of the personal account of a principal Southern fighter, alongside extracts from military documents and the historical record. American War is the exciting debut by Omar El Akkad, an award-winning journalist who was born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and now lives in Oregon.
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