The Western Awakening Quartet follows the lives and loves of three families – American, British, and Israeli – as they facilitate and then fight in the two great conflicts in the second decade of the 21st Century; conflicts that despite their great human cost will trigger an extraordinary burst of global economic growth that takes humankind to the stars.
The first conflict is between tiny but nuclear-armed Israel and its host of enemies and their tacit supporters. While not predicted before the event, with hindsight we can see that the nuclear war was inevitable, because, unlike in the earlier Cold War, one of the adversaries offered the other only one option: extinction – through surrender and extermination, or nuclear holocaust. Israel had no choice but to the fight.
The second conflict is between the technology-empowered peoples of previously democratic nations, notably the US and UK, and the oligarchies that by the second decade have come to rule them. In retrospect, it is obvious that the fusing of political parties into oppressive and corrupt incumbent elites was bound to trigger a violent response from tightly networked, independently informed, and powerfully armed free peoples.
The four books follow the three families through the successive stages of these dislocations: their initial radicalization and forging of weapons and technologies for the coming conflicts; the British Correction of 2016; the thermonuclear war of 2017; and the American Revolution and start of the collective move off-planet in 2017/2019.