Future Warfare: French Sci-Fi Authors Imagine a Post-Territorial World Amidst Climate Crisis

2024-07-26 18:36:21

Published on July 26, 2024, at 20:36. / Modified on July 26, 2024, at 20:37.

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From blockbusters like “Interstellar” to “The Three-Body Problem,” hard science fiction has permeated pop culture. This subgenre of science fiction relies on the “plausibility” of technological, scientific, and societal evolution, at the cutting edge of discoveries at the time of its writing.

How did hard SF come to be? What does science say? And what does this enthusiasm reveal about the state of our societies? Our dossier

We are in the summer of 2040. The central United States has become a desert. Populations are migrating towards the coasts, which are eroding with rising waters: +50 cm in twenty years. To control migrations, states require their populations to wear a chip containing their personal data. Those who refuse join climate refugees on the coasts. This is the birth of the first post-territorial nation: the P-nation, the pirate nation, a network of floating villages. Home to 100 million inhabitants, it conducts raids worldwide: on August 4, 2042, at 11 AM, it invades French Guiana.

This is a fiction imagined by authors for the French army. Not really a fiction, but rather a plausible scenario. Since 2019, the military has been asking French science fiction writers to envision future wars; authors like Laurent Genefort, Romain Lucazeau, Xavier Mauméjean, Virginie Tournay, and Xavier Dorison. The goal? “To anticipate the technological, economic, and societal aspects of the future, which could lead to potential conflict potentials by 2030-2060.” The name of the program: Red Team Defense. Budget: 2 million euros.