Journey to 2125 is a speculative fiction novel of one hundred thousand words. It might be found on a bookstore shelf between The Martian by Andy Weir and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. But uniquely, it is a family story, describing our shared future from a personal perspective, bringing it to life. So it is also action & adventure and family fiction, a cross-genre journey.
Journey to 2125: One Century, One Family, Rising to Challenges
The story of a family facing our future
It’s 2125 when a long-separated grandson suddenly arrives on his doorstep looking for answers. Max MacGyver retells their family story and secrets, revealing a century of challenges that they’ve faced. Journey to 2125 is one family’s touching story, across generations, of adventure, rivalry, loss, survival, and resilience.
At its heart, Journey to 2125 is the story, transpiring over a single day, of a young boy and his grandfather. Why did his parents decide to move to the Commune? What family secrets will his grandfather disclose? This is the story of a family facing our future. A small boy escapes war in Asia. A young woman flees catastrophe driven by climate change in Africa. Family members build technology companies, and others deal with the trauma of jobs lost to automation. A young couple fight for privacy and democracy. Lives are positively transformed by biomedical science and threatened by it.
Journey to 2125 is simultaneously the story of how humankind might collectively weather the tragedy and chaos that we can expect from accelerating change. It is a hard-science tour of our future. What will it feel like to live during these next one hundred years? Take this journey with Max MacGyver and his grandson, as they reveal their family history, and the road ahead for you and yours.
There is serious opportunity there, of course, but as Bengier reminds readers throughout this humane, surprising novel, the course of technological shifts is never predictable, and it will take a generation or two for robots, AI, and other technologies to reach their potential—and, for some of the descendants of Max’s adopted parents, to fight against. The episodic plotting is concerned with changes over decades, cultural and sociopolitical in addition to technological. Bengier considers the fates of the global superpowers, how long it takes smartphones and online eyeglasses to be supplanted by brain-computer interfaces, and why “All robots except the military ones and those in factories have a blind spot behind.”
“You are here to save the planet,” an engineer tells grad students in the mid 21st century. Journey to 2125 explores how some could try. The result is a thoughtful, human-scaled future history, examining the lives—some hopeful, some tragic—of refugees, engineers, public policy-makers, entrepreneurs, and more as they’re both shaped by the world they’ve inherited and committed to saving it.
Takeaway: Sweeping, humane SF novel of one family, the next century, and all the change to come.
Comparable Titles: Kim Stanley Robinson, Sequoia Nagamatsu.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: B+
