Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. “Those who give up liberty in the pursuit of safety deserve neither.” Now I’ve probably misquoted that, but that idea comes from Benjamin Franklin and it’s at the heart and soul of the book The Price of Safety by Michael C. Bland.
It’s a science fiction book set a couple of decades in the future where surveillance is everywhere and you’re safe right up to the point where everything comes apart. I’m really lucky that often when I’m talking about a work, we’re wondering what the author meant. It’s actually easier if we just talk to the author directly. And that’s who my guest is today. Michael C. Bland. Michael, how are you doing today?
Michael
Matthew, thank you for having me on. I’m doing well.
Matthew
My pleasure. Now, as always, I want to encourage people to engage with the material. So if you want to pause this, go to your favorite bookstore, either online or in person. I’m always going to recommend Bookshop.org. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t worry — we’re going to fill you in. We’re not going to spoil all of the plot, but we’re going to give you the basic ideas because we want to talk about the main questions it raises. Before that, Michael, just a little introduction. Tell us about yourself and how you got started as a science fiction writer.
Michael
Again, thank you for having me. I have been writing on and off for a number of years. Back when I was 10 years old, I wrote my own comic books. I created three of them and drew them myself — they weren’t very good, but they showed my love for writing and telling stories. I’ve always been a science fiction nut. My father had science fiction novels all throughout the house, so I grew up on it.
More recently, I decided to get serious about it. I took classes at the University of Iowa’s Summer Writers Workshop. So to any authors out there, I highly recommend going there for their summer workshop. I started to develop the story that became The Price of Safety, and after working on it for a couple of years, I was able to get it traditionally published by a company called World Castle. It became a top 10 Amazon bestseller for dystopian fiction. It won a number of awards, and that led to the second book, The Price of Rebellion, and then the third, The Price of Freedom, which just came out last year. Between the three, they’ve won a total of 15 awards, including Best Science Fiction of the Year by Indies Today for The Price of Rebellion. Wonderful.
Matthew
Yeah. And I’ve read the first one and parts of the second and third. I’m looking forward to those. We’ll mostly talk about the first, though. Like I said, there are going to be some spoilers, but we want to mostly talk about the questions it raises. So let me try and give the author himself a brief summary of his own work — tell me where I’m wrong.
Our protagonist is a guy named Dray Quintero. He’s a scientist and an inventor. As the book opens, he’s helping to promote a new power source that’s hopefully going to revolutionize the world. We come to learn that he has also been a key player in designing the security systems of the United States. I think it was 2057 — is that correct?
Michael
2047.
Matthew
2047, thank you. And in this world, surveillance is very high, because that’s what keeps people safe — if you can watch everything. And there’s… did you watch the recent TV show, The Copenhagen Test? Not yet?
Michael
Not yet. I plan to.
Matthew
I hope there are no lawsuits that come out of it, because it’s a very similar idea in some ways. But understandably, there’s all sorts of surveillance in this world, including the ability to hack into or observe someone’s own vision through technological means. And Dray is perfectly happy in this world. He has designed it. He’s convinced it keeps people safe. Right up until the point where he gets a frantic call from his daughter saying that her boyfriend is dead and she’s in trouble. At first the story is that the boyfriend attacked her. As things unfold, Dray is convinced she’s innocent, but worried she might not look that way to the surveillance state. So he has to help cover up the apparent crime. As the story goes on, we learn that his daughter is part of a web of rebellion against the surveillance state, and he gets pulled along on this great series of adventures involving his whole family. Through the course of it, he — and the reader — is forced to ask: what is the price of safety? How much is it okay to give up? How much can these kinds of powers be abused? And there are great questions about family loyalty — where does loyalty to your family allow you to break the law, even when you think the law is just, or to put yourself in danger? Did I cover the main points?
Michael
Yes, you did. Good job.
Matthew
So what was the inspiration for this particular story?
Michael
I was inspired when I was living in Chicago. I was on the L one day and I realized every other person in the car was just staring at their phone. I could have started taking my clothes off and no one would have had any idea — yet at the same time, there were cameras in the ceiling of the car. So while no one is watching, someone is always potentially watching. That started me thinking about how we’ve all just gotten really comfortable with, or at least accepted, security cameras everywhere.
Walk down a Sunday street — I read a statistic that in London, the average person is caught on video 338 times in the course of a day. There’s that safety factor to it, but then at the same time, if there’s someone you care about who is in trouble, how do you protect that person in a world that is becoming more and more monitored? How do you avoid that? And with this kind of power and ability to track everybody, who are the people behind that power and what is their end game?
Matthew
And how much does that desire to keep themselves in power become the goal itself?
Michael
Absolutely. That’s the risk.
Matthew
One thing I was struck by as the story went on was the sense of paranoia that develops in the protagonist and in all the characters who are on the run. It’s been years since I read 1984, but one thing I remember from that book was the idea that it’s not that you think someone is watching all the time — it’s that you never know who’s watching when, so you have to act as if someone is watching all the time. In the world you create, some people have their optics monitored and some don’t, but you have to assume everyone does. And you can never trust anyone — can your own family betray you?
Michael
Exactly. And especially the more surveillance systems are hooked up to AI, where it’s able to notice things that are out of the ordinary and flag them for people with authority to investigate — it’s becoming more and more the case that you have to expect you’re being watched. They can also always go back on the data. Even if you’ve been under someone’s radar for a while, you could trigger something that causes them to look back at what you’ve been doing and build a case against you.
Matthew
One thing I was struck by is that when Dray finds Raven with the dead boy, he’s not focused as much on what actually happened — he’s focused on what it looks like. With surveillance, that’s a lot of the question: not what actually happened, but how will it look? And obviously there’s a lot that surveillance doesn’t see. Talk about how that came into the story.
Michael
Well, in fact, because I told the story in first person point of view — it’s all through Dray’s eyes — if he doesn’t see it, the reader doesn’t see it. I play with that throughout the story. But it is very visual in terms of what we see, because that’s what’s going to trigger the authorities — the ones you don’t want watching you. Once you come onto their radar, life becomes much more difficult. Everything you do will start to be watched. That triggers them digging into your finances, your beliefs, your activities, how big a threat you are, and whether they’re going to make you disappear.
Matthew
That’s such a great parallel, because in our own world we know that people monitor search terms and that internet records are kept. I have friends who are authors — one friend loves writing murder mysteries, and every now and then she’ll think, “If I Google how long does it take for a body to dissolve in acid, what is that going to look like?” At one point she wanted to write a book about child trafficking, and she had to be incredibly careful. You Google those things and you end up on a watch list, no matter how much you try to explain your research purpose.
Michael
Right. No matter how innocent your reason is, I’m sure almost every author’s search history has them on some sort of list because of the strange things we all have to Google — whether we used it in our story or not. You need to have an understanding. A lot of really strange things.
Matthew
For sure. It’s funny, too, because I love how much this surveillance state is already just a part of the world we live in. I live in Minneapolis and I’m living this every day right now. Also, as I mentioned before we got started, I just had a kid. It’s a wonderful thing. And when it was time for him to no longer sleep in our room — mom and dad wanted more sleep — we got him a great crib, his own room, and what did we set up? A monitor. A nice little camera that points right at him with smart features and volume turned up so we hear any noise he makes.
This feels like the most innocuous thing you could possibly do. Of course you want to know if your child is in danger whatsoever. And yet the first time my wife and I sat down and looked at him in that darkened room on the low-light camera, it was such a moment of, “Oh my God, this is how it works.”
Michael
Such a slippery slope, isn’t it? But your intentions were completely honorable — you were there to protect your child while also getting a little sleep, helping him learn to be comfortable on his own. So all really good reasons for doing that. It comes down to intent — what people are going to use the surveillance for.
Matthew
And I think that’s kind of part of the point of your book, right? Dray helps design this because he thinks it keeps people safe. On one level maybe that’s true, but that’s what you mean by the price of safety — what are you paying for this?
Michael
Absolutely. Two things: one, he has two children — he had a third who was lost — and a big reason behind the security is that he wants to help protect his kids and other people’s kids. And the other aspect is the price of things in general. I’m guilty of this myself. I have a free Gmail account. Google can very easily use all the data from that free account because it isn’t really free, is it? You’re paying a price of some degree. What is that price? Do you even really know? Start to think about what the price of using the free internet is. It’s great and there are so many things you can use it for to improve your life, but there is a potential price.
Matthew
And when you’re sitting down to write, what you want to do more than anything is tell a good story, but obviously you’re hoping to get your audience thinking. And my impression is that you’re not saying we should turn everything off — you’re saying we should think about it more and not just take it for granted. Correct?
Michael
Absolutely. Technology is great. I love it as much as anybody else. Some of the things I created in my books I really want to come true — I think they’d be really cool. But it’s exactly to your point: we want to make sure we’re going into this with our eyes open and aware of the risks. I think we’re way past the point of being able to opt out, especially from security, unless you want to put yourself in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. But it’s about being aware of the risks in the world we live in today. And if you’re not comfortable with it, how do you respond?
Matthew
I mean, I think you and I are a similar age — I’m born in the 70s. One of the things I feel like I’ve experienced is that we grew up without the internet, we slowly got used to it, and in a way there really was a feeling of anonymity when it started. You didn’t put your real name online. You put something like “rebel612” — there was a sense of anonymity. And I feel like people today should know that. Every now and then I’ll see people posting about what we’re doing here in Minneapolis, and someone will say, “Hey, remember, we can’t guarantee this group isn’t monitored.” And people freak out about that. Do you think there’s still this assumption of safety — that if you’re in a private chat with five friends, therefore it’s totally safe?
Michael
It almost seems like a bit of human nature — well, unless I can actually see the potential threat, this should be okay. And maybe a little bit of, well, there are millions of users, what do they care about me? But you become a statistic, especially if a chat is discussing things that are going on in your area or going down a political route — that starts triggering certain flags.
And I’ve been noticing more recently that almost any time you want to check out a website, they say, “Give me your email address, give me your phone number.” You really lose that ability to be anonymous because all of that can be tracked and followed. And you know, even if it’s just the bare minimum cookies — there’s still a level of tracking. Software from AVG or McAfee will clean up those cookies to stop tracking on your computer, but next time you go on the internet, there’s more tracking. All of those things whittle away at the ability to be anonymous and to search for things without potentially ending up on a list.
And not to get political, but the most recent administration, with DOGE coming in and getting everyone’s data, trying to have it all in one center — why? What’s the reason? What’s going to be the impact down the road? I don’t have that answer, but it should be a big cause for concern.
Matthew
I’m glad you raised the politics. It’s something we definitely talk about here. I want to keep the focus on your book, but this first book was written about five or six years ago?
Michael
The first one was written in 2018, 2019, and came out early 2020.
Matthew
I have to wonder what it’s been like over the last six years watching the future you were predicting start to come true. We’re obviously not anywhere near that point — I don’t want to be alarmist — but clearly the surveillance state has continued to increase, not just under this most recent administration but certainly under it, and in other parts of the world as well. What’s it been like seeing the dystopia you created in your mind start coming true a little bit?
Michael
I have to admit, it’s a little of a weird feeling. Part of me is really concerned, because I certainly don’t want the world I created to come to pass. But there’s also a little bit of, maybe I was right. I try to make the stories as realistic as possible, and I’ve had family members — my wife — look at me and say, “Okay, this is getting scary,” because we keep seeing things that were in my books.
Here’s a really quick aside. One of the pieces of technology I envisioned is called a DNA scanner — because we all shed dead skin cells and hair follicles. In my book, that machine sucks those out of the air, runs the DNA, and identifies you. A month after my second book came out, a company in California announced they had created that exact technology. A very freaky moment when I read that.
Matthew
I’m guessing you didn’t get any copyright payment.
Michael
Still waiting for that check. And of course that company said they’d put those machines on hiking trails so if someone gets lost, we can identify where they were. Sure — but other people may use that same technology in other ways.
Matthew
Well, especially because right now, if you think you need to get away from cameras and listening devices, where would you go? Maybe on a hike. That’s the first place I’d think of — not right now in Minnesota where it’s colder than Hoth, but any other time of the year.
Michael
And then they can track you there, and now you’re on another list — who you met, where you went.
Matthew
You know, another podcast I work on is one where we watch Marvel movies minute by minute. We just started Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I remember the first time I watched that movie — I really enjoyed it, but I thought, “Oh come on, a government putting people on watch lists, calling them un-American, unworthy of being here because they have the wrong ideas? That would never happen.” I watch it today and I’m like, okay. I was wrong. You were right.
Michael
Yes, exactly. And it’s concerning. I don’t have any answers, but it’s definitely concerning.
Matthew
One of the most interesting parts of Dray’s journey is that when he first finds out Raven is part of a rebel group, his answer is no — even as he starts to think maybe she has a point about what they’re fighting against. She’s his daughter. He doesn’t want her fighting. And by the end of the book — spoilers, but if you’ve read science fiction you probably see where this is going — he and his daughter are far more connected to the rebellion than he ever would have wanted. Talk about that journey, because I think it’s about figuring out what risks we’re willing to take. A teenager could read this and think, “I haven’t stood up to the school bully who keeps picking on that other kid in my class — maybe I should put myself at risk a little more to stand up for what’s right.” Talk about Dray’s journey toward being more willing to take risks for himself and for his daughter.
Michael
That was one of the big themes of the book and one of the big reasons I wanted to write it — how do you not only protect the people you care about, but do something about it in a world that can track and monitor you in ways you can’t avoid? Because it’s easy to just accept and say, “It’s fine, I’m going to go about my life.” But if you find yourself in a world where accepting that means giving up virtually all of your freedoms, there has to be a point where you say, “It’s enough. I have to stand up.” And for Dray, that’s an additional challenge — if he stands up, not only for himself but to try to give his daughters a future, he’s also putting them in danger no matter how much he tries to shield them.
But throughout the story, he keeps getting pulled more toward taking that leap. And that’s a horribly difficult thing to do. The people who are standing up today, in various ways, show a huge amount of bravery. Those who march and stand up for either side of political issues — I applaud their commitment. I’m not saying one way is right and one is wrong. But in the world I created, there is a clearer line in terms of right and wrong, and once Dray really realizes what has been going on, it becomes clear what he should do to help his children — even though doing so puts them in terrible danger.
Matthew
Let’s back up to how he first gets pulled in, because I think his feelings toward Raven and toward his other daughter and his wife all change a lot through the course of the book. He comes upon a scene where his daughter is covered in blood and there’s a dead boy on the ground. I’d heard an interview with you before I read it, so I knew that part of the point was that she’s not as innocent as it might look at first.
I was thinking about studies from six or seven years ago when school bullying became a big deal. There was a survey where 80% of parents said their kids were being bullied. On the one hand, I think more kids are bullied than we acknowledge. But I was also thinking that a lot of those parents’ kids were probably doing some of the bullying as well. As parents, we never want to accept that our kid might be the one doing something wrong. What’s the story behind that for you?
Michael
I wanted to put him in a position where he had no choice but to do what he thought was right in order to get her out of the situation — especially because he helped create this surveillance state, with the best of intentions. And that’s one thing I really like about the characters: no one is black and white. No one is perfectly good or perfectly evil. The bad guy has layers. Everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story. Just like you think your kids are angels, or at least good kids overall — every bad guy thinks they’re doing the right thing for the right reason. That’s how I approached the story.
And it was interesting to have someone like his daughter, who is 19, technically an adult — she has a level of maturity and knows that what she’s doing isn’t entirely above-board, but she has her own reasons. She thinks she’s the hero of her own story and that she’s doing things for the right reasons. And what happened with Trevor, the boyfriend at the beginning of the story, was absolutely unfortunate. But her underlying reason for even being there in the first place is not so innocent.
Matthew
And I think that’s watching his journey — it’s easy to just have one single moment where a character figures things out, but instead you see it’s a process. It goes up and down. At first he’s in it because she’s innocent. Then he wonders if she’s just a flat-out murderer who killed one guy to be with another. Then it turns out there’s a rebel group — the Founding Fathers — recruiting her. And I got the sense of, “Is it better if my daughter is an idealistic terrorist or a murderer?” He comes to sort of see that maybe the idealistic terrorist is better, since one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. It’s fascinating to watch him go through that journey.
Michael
Thank you. I definitely wanted to have that struggle and that journey, because it’s also a big leap from the beginning of the book to the end. If I had tried to speed that up, I wasn’t sure it would be believable. I’ve read a number of books, I’m sure you and your listeners have as well, where you’re enjoying it and then there’s some leap that the author makes and you think, “No, I don’t buy that.” I really try to avoid that in all three books, because otherwise it takes you out of the story and you lose something. So I try to make his struggle and journey as realistic as possible — in this world that, while fictional, is meant to feel as realistic as possible. It was that balance throughout.
Matthew
My sense is that you’re creating Raven — and Jax, who I understand is actually her entree into the Founding Fathers — as a kind of moral counterweight. We learn that while Jax has genuinely fallen for her, he was partly using her to get to her father. So there’s this fun Romeo and Juliet thing going on. What winds up happening is that she gets established as the other moral pole. If Dray represents “I’m willing to sacrifice all of my freedom for safety,” she represents “I’m willing to put everything on the line for freedom.” And I liked how the book starts to wrestle with whether she’s right. The next book is called The Price of Rebellion — so I’m guessing that’s a question you’ve given some thought to?
Michael
Absolutely. She’s the idealistic one. She’s younger, so of course she’s more idealistic. But she also really wants to make a difference and help those who can’t help themselves. They each come at it from a different angle, and where they both end up during their respective journeys — arriving at kind of the same end point from different directions, for different reasons.
Matthew
As you mentioned before, there was a third child — whose name I’m sorry to say I’m blanking on — but Adam. He died fairly young. Without going too much into the details, something terrible happened, and as you said, that’s part of what motivates Dray toward wanting more safety, wanting to make the world safer for kids like Adam and for the children he still has. That also really struck me. I think a lot of times we start making these sacrifices after a great loss — everything from America after 9/11 to if one partner cheats on you, suddenly you’re a lot more likely to wonder what they’re doing when they stay out an extra hour. That sense of loss and trauma being part of what motivates us to want more safety. Can you talk more about your thinking on that?
Michael
It was definitely a very important part of both Dray and his marriage. Losing a child — luckily it never happened to me, but I could relate to aspects of it from things in my own past. It’s one of those things you never completely get over. It forever changes you as a person. How you adjust afterward — as you said, if you’ve been cheated on, you’ll always wonder about your spouse.
So that was part of what I wanted to explore and have as part of the driving force. He has two daughters he loves tremendously. But there’s been friction between him and his wife as a result of that loss — how they each handled it and reacted differently, with their own pasts. You might have the closest marriage, but a trauma like that, each person is going to react potentially in a different way. Do they find their way back to each other? Is the marriage done? What happens? That was a subplot with real ramifications in the story, and it was something I found really interesting — not only to give the motivation for why Dray does what he does in terms of creating this surveillance network, but to show the echoes still reverberating years after they lost their son.
Matthew
For sure. Just to affirm what you’re talking about — I used to do a lot of counseling for couples going through some kind of reproductive loss, and one of the things I found is that divorce rates among couples who’ve had infant or young child loss just skyrocket. A lot of the time it’s because there’s a feeling that together you experienced this terrible trauma, but in reality it’s two people who’ve experienced the same trauma individually. They often try to do it together, but they’re not going to have the same experience of it, and especially if they heal in different ways and at different paces. I think you tell that story brilliantly. I want to get to the character of Mina in a moment, but I want to push a little more on this idea of fear and trauma — how that can motivate us to be willing to give up more for safety and to make more moral compromises out of that fear.
Michael
Absolutely. A lot of his fear comes from a level of helplessness — because he lost that child and wasn’t able to save him. So how do you make sure that never happens again? How do you reduce that feeling of helplessness? That’s a big driver behind it. And I thought that was very interesting, because even though this is a science fiction story — no aliens, no spaceships, it’s a near-future world — there’s still family, still loss, still emotions, still those interactions and their ramifications. I thought it would be really interesting to explore that within the science fiction genre.
Matthew
And that’s so essential. What I love most about science fiction is when it takes a problem that people deal with today, puts it in a completely different situation, and still asks about the same problem in a way people can relate to. My mother used to watch original episodes of Star Trek with me, and that’s exactly what those stories did. My first real entrée into that world was Star Wars from a very young age — my mother would say A New Hope was my babysitter. She could put it in the Betamax, and walk away and know I was going to be glued to that TV.
One of the things that has always stuck with me is that idea that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate — and I look at that today in everything from a friend who’s been badly hurt by one relationship and now has trouble trusting their new partner, all the way up to “we need to know everything about people who board planes” or “why can’t we just identify this one group and keep them out.” It’s a reaction to helplessness — a desire to have more control. And that desire for control is where so much of these problems begin.
Michael
Not to mention that the desire to watch more and learn more starts taking over a large part of your focus and activities. Are you really healing and getting better? Or are you letting your fear and your trauma consume you?
Matthew
Right. And I think you give a good example of that. Big spoilers for a major plot point halfway through the book — if you want to pause, go read it. Because Dray and his wife Mina are having very different experiences of their son’s loss. And then you introduce this villain, Kiernan, a secret agent in the best traditions of what that can mean. He offers Dray a deal: help us take down these rebels and you and your family will be totally safe. And Dray can’t bring himself to do it — partly because he doesn’t trust them, but also because he thinks it’s wrong. What Mina does — and in Mina’s mind, she keeps the family safe, which is what matters most — is she betrays them. Of course, it winds up getting their other daughter, Talia, killed. Talk about that — that desire to keep your family safe at all costs makes so much sense to us emotionally, yet you make it an antagonist that leads to the exact opposite of what she wanted.
Michael
I wanted to show that doing what we think will make things better doesn’t always work out, and sometimes can make things horribly wrong. While everyone might have the best intentions — and Mina had her reasons for doing it, which I go into in the book — be careful of what you think you want. She’s allowing herself to believe that this bad guy, who clearly has other intentions, is going to honor the offer he’s making. She’s deluding herself, turning a blind eye to the risks. And that’s also a bigger reflection of the book’s larger story — allowing the security and surveillance state to grow by turning a blind eye to the risks. I wanted to use that to have people really stop and think: do they want to accept this state of affairs, where anyone in power can track you, identify you as a potential risk, and then what’s going to be the consequence?
Matthew
Do you know the phrase “leopards won’t eat my face”? It gets tossed around a lot in liberal and lefty circles. It’s talking about the idea of, “Yes, I know that this group targets all those other people, but they won’t hurt me. I will be safe.” And we’ve seen a lot of people who supported a certain administration and are now being hurt by tariffs or other policies. There’s some cruelty in the mocking of it, I’ll admit, but the point is: “You were convinced the leopards wouldn’t eat your face. You were convinced that you would be safe if you collaborated, if you helped out.” And that’s not limited to any one administration — it happens across the political spectrum. People often convince themselves that even though a group is fundamentally untrustworthy, they can trust them personally, and it will be fine. It never works out. That’s very much what I see in Mina’s story — the danger of convincing yourself, despite all evidence, that if you just trust this one person, everything will be okay.
Michael
And there’s also the element of manipulation on the bad guy’s part. He knows exactly which buttons to push with her. She lets herself believe the spin he gives her, with horrible consequences.
Matthew
I don’t want to spoil anything, but does she appear again in later books, or should I just wait until I read more?
Michael
She comes back.
Matthew
I’ll leave it at that. I was a little surprised — I’m glad to hear we’ll see more from her. I don’t want to go much longer, but there’s one last thing I want to ask about because I think it’s really germane to all of this. And this does involve spoilers from the very end of the book. Towards the end, there’s a sense that the characters are peeling back layer after layer of the onion, and they still fundamentally want to believe that the system itself is okay. They come up with the idea that it’s the agency that’s bad and corrupt — and if the government only knew about the problems with the agency, everything would be okay. And through some great technological shenanigans, they figure out that’s not the case. To me, that felt like such a powerful statement: you have to stop trusting almost everything. What’s going on there?
Michael
One of the key pieces of technology in the story — which I would actually love to have — is that everyone has a small implant in their hand, basically like a miniature computer, and they have lenses with clear computer screens overlaid on them. Imagine Google Glass or Apple’s mixed reality, but taken to the nth degree, where you can interact with the real world while being digitally connected. That’s a great potential technology. But the risk is that someone can manipulate what you see. And if I can manipulate what you see, I can manipulate what you think.
And that goes back to: are you allowing yourself to be manipulated in ways that, if you really stopped and paid attention to what was really going on, you might not be? Unfortunately, I’m as guilty of this as anybody else — being busy, being distracted, having your own concerns and issues. But if you don’t keep your eyes wide open, there’s a risk. I wanted to reinforce that and take this technology to what seemed like a logical conclusion: letting others have access to everyone and to that technology, and being able to link into it — what would you then do with it?
Matthew
That’s such a powerful idea. If you can control what people see, you control what they think. We don’t have it directly in our brains, but between social media and regular media, we certainly have something close to it. And even just talking to a friend about a problem they had with their boss — you’re hearing that friend’s version, you’re not seeing the other side.
And something I find really helpful with my own neurodiversity is that I don’t always trust my own memory, because if I have a conflict with my father or my partner, there’s an emotional attachment to how I remember it — there’s neuroscience that backs this up. I’ll remember what they said as worse than it actually was. So my wife and I have agreed that when we have a hard conversation, sometimes we’ll have it over instant messages so there’s a written record. If she says something I find hurtful, my brain might remember it two weeks later as much worse than it was. So I can go back and check — and often see that it wasn’t that bad, and she was actually kind of right.
So when I first read about the technology in your book where you can literally download your memories, I thought, “This is amazing.” But of course it’s also terrifying, because once it’s created, you can do anything with it.
Michael
Absolutely. Memory is very flawed, and I don’t have an easy fix other than downloading those memories. But we’re not perfect. And what I’m worried about is that the more advanced we become and the better the technology — and we haven’t even touched on AI, the ability to manipulate images, create fake videos — that’s going to make it even harder, not only for our generation but for future generations, to know what to believe.
Matthew
Yeah, it’s something really scary to think about as I look at what my child and their peers are going to grow up into. Let me pull back the camera a bit, because one of the whole ideas of this show is looking at how the media we love gets us to think about things differently. I’m a big believer that, yes, I could write an essay about the surveillance state and why it’s problematic — but someone making a movie or writing a book is often going to be a more productive way of getting that conversation started. It seems like you were someone who looked at the world, was frustrated and a little scared about what you saw, and writing was how you responded to that. Talk a bit about how that has worked for you — and whether, having done it, you find it helpful to be able to look at the world and the problems you see and say, “Here’s what I did. Here’s how I played my part.”
Michael
Absolutely. I definitely wanted to bring this to people’s attention. Keep in mind, though, that on a surface level I first try to make it a fun, fast-paced book with great characters and twists. So my original purpose was entertainment. Please — anybody who’s concerned — I don’t think there’s going to be a dry stretch in it.
Matthew
No, it really is a fun book, thank you. But having said that, yes, this was clearly something that was very important and very concerning to me. I started out realizing that I had not been hung up over all these cameras, all this surveillance, all the free services on the internet — Gmail and everything else. I was as neck-deep as anybody. So it was partly a wake-up call to myself as well: hey, I need to be aware of this. And I need to ask whether this is the kind of world we want to live in. I know there are ways to potentially push back as the technology gets more and more sophisticated and prevalent.
Michael
That’s definitely something that I think needs to be continually addressed. With my stories and others like them, I’ll write about these topics so that more people are aware and can start to push back
if they don’t like where this is going.
Matthew
Well, that’s really where I wanted to get to, and why I asked that question. A lot of people feel very powerless right now — and I think that’s true on all sides of the political spectrum, and not even just politically. It’s about what’s happening at their workplace, in their family. There are lots of things people can do — people in the streets, people working in politics and advocacy. But also, I’m not an artistic person, so it’s not me. But every time someone says, “I see this, and I want to write a book about it, a poem, a painting, a song,” — to me, that is just one more great way of bringing attention to what matters. So I want to thank you for that, and use it to say to our listeners: you don’t have to be out in the streets. There are so many things you can be doing. If you’re creative and this is your kind of thing, please do it, because we need more works like this. But also — yes, put a good story in there, put the personal in, put some great chase scenes in. There are a lot of chase scenes in this book, and a lot of really interesting stuff about dark matter, which I know nothing about in terms of astrophysics, but it was a really fun science fiction element.
Michael
So for people who want to pick up this book — and then all three books: The Price of Safety, The Price of Rebellion, The Price of Freedom.
That’s right. Where else can people find you? Do you have a blog, a podcast? Where can we keep surveillance on you to follow what you’re up to?
The best place is through my website, which is mcbland.com. Very easy. I’m also on Facebook and Instagram — you should be able to link to me from my website. The books are available on Audible as well as in print and ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and all kinds of places. Out there in every format.
Matthew
Right now I’m spending a lot of time with a baby in my arms, so I can hold a Kindle and read pretty easily. But there’s a lot of times where I’m consuming books on long drives, washing dishes, or folding baby clothes. So knowing it’s on Audible is just so great.
Michael
The narrator, Andrew, did a fantastic job. My publisher found him; he did all three books and did an incredible job. Highly recommend the audio version.
Matthew
That’s great. Well, Michael, thank you so much. And to all our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Please let us know what you think. If you’ve read the book especially, send us your thoughts. What are your thoughts on the surveillance state? I hope you don’t have the Elf on the Shelf — but what do you think about all that? And most importantly, may the force be with you.
Michael
Matthew, thank you for having me on.
