What's Next?
A journey through the 21st century
Synopsis
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.
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. Some family members build technology companies, while 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.
At its heart, Journey to 2125 is the story, told 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 share?
Parts political drama, family saga, and hard-science speculative fiction, Journey to 2125 is the story of how humankind might collectively weather the tragedy and chaos that we can expect from accelerating change. 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.
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From BookLife (Publishers Weekly) – an Editors' Pick –
Sweepingly ambitious yet focused with intimate detail on one family, this forecast/call-for-action from Bengier (author of Journey to 2125) surveys the next century of life on Earth.
“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.
Takeaways: Sweeping, humane SF novel of one family, the next century, and all the change to come.
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"One family’s consequential journey through the trials and triumphs of the coming century, including climate change, medicine, AI, and the new world order as robots displace human labor, all while experiencing the multi-generational tug of family dynamics, and what it means to be a human. A must read for those who seek to understand how technology and humanity will shape the coming century."
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"Personal and highly believable, the interesting family of characters in Journey to 2125
attempt to solve humanity's most pressing problems of the next century."
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"Unfettered Journey is a fast-paced adventure that simultaneously explores profound problems in the philosophy of mind.”
A quick start:
I'll share the opening scene, for a taste of the future.
It begins with a splash, then rushing down the unknown river of life, each unique as Heraclitus said, around and through each oxbow and rapids, no doubt ending at an astonishing waterfall.
That visceral memory still wakes me after all these years—a recurring nightmare of bone-chilling cold water. Salt in my mouth and the burn in my eyes. The big man behind me pushes me up and I dog-paddle toward the white ship with the big red cross. People surround me in the water, crying, swimming. My life vest is too big, the straps loose, and the big man lifts me when a swell splashes over. I am tired, and my arms are heavy. I swallow seawater with each wave. Some people are sinking, and their heads disappear.
He hollers at me in Mandarin, his hard face close to mine. “Help me help you. Swim!”
We reach the ship, and he boosts me up to the thick, hanging rope net, and I grab hold and pull myself out of the cold water. It’s like the playground bars, and I climb to the top.
I sit shivering on the deck next to the big man as a nice woman in white dries me with a towel and wraps me with a blanket. He tousles my hair, then he looks at me, and tears come from his eyes. I can tell he is thinking of someone else. His muscled hand is not too rough, though I still flinch when he reaches out. I lose track of the big man, and when the ship fills with so many people from the water like me, I don’t see him again until days later.
The nice woman points me to a doorway to descend into the ship, but I duck to the side and stay by the railing to watch everyone else come up the net. I’m short, and it is noisy and crowded, so I can hide by the rail. The tiny boat is now empty. It drifts away from the ship.
Before we all jumped off the boat to get to the ship, a jet had roared overhead. Everyone screamed, and many had prayed. But the ship was near, and people on its deck watched, and nothing bad happened.
Now the boat’s sail flaps in the wind, and it bobs sideways as the ship’s engines vibrate the deck, and our big ship turns away.
The fishing boat grows smaller behind us, and the jet returns. It flies low over the little boat. Fire shoots from the jet, there is a huge explosion, and the boat is gone. I watch the pile of drifting wood where it had been. The jet streaks away. My heart beats in my chest like a drum. The nice woman in the white dress is back, and she takes me inside the ship.
“How old were you when this happened?”
I am brought back to 2125. To my grandson. To my story. “I was eight when we were rescued by the Americans.”
He sits at the table eating eggs and bacon. He has a full head of black hair, as much as I ever had, but his is curly. Do his cheekbones resemble mine? He has an oval face with an attractive chin like so many in our family. Sadly, I see few signs of his grandmother in him, except for a softness around his mouth and fullness to his lips. His arms are tanned and muscular, more than I’d expect for a fourteen-year-old boy, like he spends time outdoors doing heavy labor.
“And the big man? Who was he?” His eyes are alive for the first time since he arrived near sunrise. Some of the trapped expression he wore then has disappeared. I’ll tell him stories for a while and let him decide when to tell me his story.
