Press Kit
Known for his historical fiction, David Cairns of Finavon (writing under the pseudonym of Mitchell Glenn) turns his ability to create vivid, immersive prose into a painting of the future. 2173 is his first venture into science fiction - a dystopian look into the world towards which we may be heading. 2173 documents the climate change spike flooding coastlines later this century, nuclear conflict, the advent of limitless fusion energy and reliable quantum computing and the rise of a planetary AI controlled by the billionaire elites and their progeny. End product: 8 billion souls virtually enslaved in three Superblocs with implanted neural identity tokens. But there is a stirring. The cracks are beginning to open up. And that's how the light gets in. The story gathers pace as events unfold leading to a stunning conclusion.
Carrying echoes of Orwell's 1984, this is perhaps an update cataloguing the potential fall of society as global wealth becomes concentrated in the 'Founding Houses' and their use of evolving technology creates a cage, a prison until a few rebel souls begin probing the cracks in the system
This book is dedicated to all those who have stood in the long, unbroken line of those who refused.
To the nameless and the named. To those who paid the price before history learned to record it, and to those whose sacrifice was witnessed by the whole world and changed nothing - then everything.
To William Wallace, whose defiance has echoed across centuries and whose story reminds us that the desire to be free is older than any tyranny devised to suppress it.
And to Alexei Navalny - lawyer, dissident, father, and the clearest moral voice of his generation - who looked at one of the most dangerous men on earth and refused, repeatedly and deliberately, to be silent. Who returned to Russia knowing what awaited him. Who died in a Russian penal colony in February 2024, murdered by an autocratic state that feared one man's conscience more than it feared the world's condemnation.
All of them, they were not defeated. They were not silenced. The courage they demonstrated in life became, in death, a light that no authoritarian darkness could ever extinguish.
This story is fiction. The hunger for freedom it describes is not.
The line continues.