Elliot Ackerman's Reading List

"Ender’s Game is a science fiction novel that has always been near and dear to my heart. I read it when I was a boy, several times, and I’ve read it with my own children. I put it in the category of being an apocalyptic novel because it deals with war between humanity and what Card calls “the buggers.” That conflict is one in which those two societies are locked in a struggle that will end in one of their demises. And so it’s a book about the end of a civilization, but it’s also a book about war. “Serving in places like Iraq and Afghanistan…you come to see how very tenuous society is” The protagonist of the novel is a boy named Ender Wiggin. In the novel, you travel with him, from about the age of seven to nine or ten years old. The premise of the book is that it takes a childlike understanding of emotion and a childlike intelligence to become the type of facile military commander that humanity needs in order to anticipate the actions of an adversary that’s trying to destroy us. So Ender becomes the general in this war. Fiction teaches you and war forces you to learn empathy, much the same way Ender does. When you go to war, when you are in combat, you become locked in a shadow dance with your adversary. This was certainly my experience. You spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to anticipate your adversaries’ actions. To survive and to win you must understand who they are and what they might do at any moment. So you’re consistently engaged in exercising empathy. And if you’re a good soldier, you’ll start to appreciate your adversary and develop sympathy for them. Ender says, “When I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment, I also love him.” You are locked in a very intimate relationship with them. And after a while, you come to appreciate who they are, despite all the differences that might exist between you. And you come to realize that the two of you have defined each other through this experience. And to a certain degree a deep, profound understanding exists between you, an intimacy that is like love. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Specific to your question about how war allows you to imagine an apocalypse: Serving in places like Iraq and Afghanistan , which have been devastated by war, you come to see how very tenuous society is and how very tenuous peace is and how tenuous the civilizations that we live in are as well."

"The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy . Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters. Apocalyptic fiction can lend itself to that technique because post-apocalyptic plots are about the destruction of civilization. That’s very much what McCarthy does in The Road. It’s just the man, the boy, the road and the journey. The tone of the book matches its apocalyptic themes. But there’s also something very redemptive in the book because it spotlights our primal desire to carry on from one generation to the next quite beautifully."

"This book speaks to this moment. It imagines a pandemic that’s far more devastating than the one that we’re living in right now. A group of traveling actors, who are getting ready to put on a Shakespeare play , are also trying to get to an airfield where it’s rumored that civilization is enduring. So, the construct of Stations Eleven is similar to The Road , but there’s more going on. It’s a very dark book, with a broader cast of characters. There’s more of an active focus on the essential role that culture plays in our civilization. But it also speaks to the importance of maintaining community in dark and challenging times; that’s something we’ve all been living with, as we’ve all been forced into isolation. One of the things that Mandel gets just right in the book is that crises tend to accentuate negative and positive trends. I’ve seen this in my own experience, in war. In a pandemic or a war, you see people at their absolute best, acting heroically. And in crisis and conflict you also see people at their most selfish and their most depraved. These situations widen the spectrum on what we are capable of. The most amazing acts of courage and empathy that I’ve seen, I’ve seen in war. And the most depraved things that I’ve ever seen in my life are also things I saw in war. War flings open the aperture of human experience. I see something similar in this pandemic in the community I live in. You see something similar in the pages of many of these apocalyptic novels. That’s one of the things that defines an apocalyptic novel — these extreme scenarios widen the possibility of what characters are capable of doing."

"Of all the books on my list, this is actually my favorite. I read it as a boy and I’ve read it to my children. The Butter Battle Book , by Dr. Seuss, is an allegory for nuclear apocalypse written during the Cold War . The premise of the book is that the Zooks eat their bread with the butter side up and the Yooks eat their bread with the butter side down. The Butter Battle Book traces the story of how this trifling difference leads to a war that starts with slingshots, then escalates with ever more elaborate weapons until the last contraption, a gumball-size bomb built by both sides, has the power to annihilate all life on the other side of the wall. The book ends with a Zook and a Yook staring at each other across the wall, on the brink of mutually assured destruction, poised to drop their bombs. Apocalypse stories almost always address what led humanity to the brink of extinction. So, they prompt writers to take on sweeping themes. All of these books are bringing to light big trends with how humans behave towards one another individually, as communities and under different conditions. So, I’ve always been drawn to these books because they take on the big things. 2034 is about what a catastrophic war would look like. Our hope is that readers, having inhabited that world, will realize that war with China is something we want to avoid. If you look at the Cold War, the reason that it stayed cold, the reason why nuclear arsenals were never used, is because both the United States and the Soviets could very clearly imagine what would happen if we went to war. Because they knew how horrible it would be, national security actors on both sides prevented catastrophe. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Many of the great national security catastrophes of the last hundred years — for instance, the Pearl Harbor and September 11th attacks — were the result of failures of imagination. The September 11th Commission explicitly concluded that. You could say the same thing about the Covid-19 pandemic . None of us imagined this. We need to actively imagine what could happen to prevent it from happening. If we consider how entanglements can lead to conflagrations and catastrophe, and our adversaries do too, we’re less likely to sleepwalk into wars. Imagination is a national security imperative. * This interview took place before Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing six titles which “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” The Butter Battle Book is not among those titles. It does not contain depictions of any people and its antiwar theme makes it a mainstay on lists of pro-peace picture books for kids."