Can A Dystopian Fiction Book Predict The Future?

Brian Hawkins [00:00:08]:

Hi, this is Brian Hawkins with Next Step Survival. And I’m here today with Mic Roland from Mic-Roland.com for a short discussion about his book Escape From The City. Mic is an author, a podcaster, a blogger, fellow prepper, and a good friend. So, Mic, how about you give a quick synopsis of your book Escape From The City, along with any details you’d like to share.

Mic Roland [00:00:27]:

Well, it is different than the Siege of New Hampshire series, not entirely so, as it still kind of deals with survival man’s ability to improvise and survive. It ended up being a metaphor for survivalism, the city people being not survivalists. And the main character encountering people living out in the wild. So it’s city people versus country people for a quick synopsis without any spoilers. It covers the experiences of a main character named Ford living in a futuristic city, which is all controlling and all providing. Most of the people in the city are obedient minions doing what they’re supposed to. Ford has discovered that there was something in the water that made everybody obedient and docile, and he started drinking rainwater instead. And he becomes enlightened. I won’t say woke, but he becomes enlightened. That starts to get him into trouble because he starts thinking for himself and the authorities don’t care for that. He manages to get himself exiled out of the city, which is, to a city person, a death sentence because you can only live in the city. And while he’s sentenced to sort of the modern version of a chain gang in the outside world because the city salvages things from the prior civilization or materials, so he’s out there in the chain gang to salvage. And while they’re returning from a salvage venture, their airplane crashes. So they’re basically lost in the Amazon, so to speak, except that it’s actually over Iowa, but still just may as well have been the Amazon. Then this chain gang of exiled city guys have to survive out in the wilderness with very little skill and training. So they’re making it up as they go. And I better stop there. Otherwise, it turns into spoilers.

Brian Hawkins [00:02:11]:

In your book description, you said the story is set several generations in the future. Considering recent agendas and actions like 15-minute cities and lab-grown meat UBI with Universal Basic Income and Central Bank Digital Currencies [CBDC], do you still see that type of future as several generations away? No.

Mic Roland [00:02:28]:

Actually, I was imagining, even in the book scenario, that those changes took place a few generations before the story takes place. The reason for the several generations later for the story timeline is that the main character, I wanted him to have grown up only in the city. That’s all he ever knew. So he had no memory of a free life outside of the city or independence. There’s a whole lot of stuff that we just take for granted because we’ve always had it around us. So things like the 15-minute cities. They strike us as really weird to be that controlled. But the main character, Ford, has grown up in that. That’s all he ever knows to him. It’s just always been that way. In the book, I think I had referred to something called The Great Triumph, which would have been the political sea change that happened a few generations before Ford, and that’s when they enacted a lot of the policies that the city is built on. It happened sooner, just like it could happen to us.

Brian Hawkins [00:03:23]:

That makes sense, where it doesn’t happen several generations away, but it’s several generations to the city. Yeah.

Mic Roland [00:03:28]:

So that city has become normal to them. It’s not something new and different to be chafed at. It’s just that’s the way everything was since day one to them.

Brian Hawkins [00:03:37]:

Right. The separation of men and women in part of the city life. Do you see a day when elimination of differences between the two sexes altogether is possible? So, in other words, it seems like today we’re trying to just eliminate two sexes and eventually blend them all together. Any thoughts on that?

Mic Roland [00:03:53]:

When I was writing The City book [Escape From The City], the whole fad of trans hadn’t happened yet, so I didn’t incorporate that into the story. Instead, when I was writing it, I was listening to a lot of the #MeToo movement, like with the Kavanaugh hearings, that it really sort of boiled down to there was nothing good about a man. He was nothing but trouble, and the only way for women to be safe and happy is to keep men far, far away from them. So I thought, well, what if you just sort of extrapolate that and start to make it law that men and women can’t be together? Well, if you can keep them apart, then you’ve eliminated all sorts of abuse problems. Of course, you’ve eliminated the family, too. But that separation in the book, it wasn’t trying to be the atomistic sort of notion. That’s with the trans philosophy now, where everybody’s their own little universe and you can be your own one of 57 flavors of gender. And like I said, you’re your own little universe instead. In the City book, there were still men and women. They recognized that they were both there, but men only grew up in a men-only world, and that’s all they knew. And they knew there were women out there, but they were afraid of them. I suppose the women were afraid of the men, too. The government used fear of each other to keep them apart, as well as laws and other zoning regulations to keep them apart. I wasn’t really imagining the elimination of the differences so much as keeping them apart so there’d be no trouble.

Brian Hawkins [00:05:15]:

Women and something like that may end up being the ruling class. Right?

Mic Roland [00:05:18]:

Well, that’s what it is in the book. It’s the matriarchy, so the ruling elites are the Machri.

Brian Hawkins [00:05:25]:

So words like love and family have been removed from the vocabulary, a lot like what we read in 1984, the book [1984 by George Orwell ^aff]. Did that come from what we see today with book banning and woke editing to remove words like fat, ugly, and crazy?

Mic Roland [00:05:37]:

Well, no city book [Escape From The City] was written before all of that became trendy. I mean, that’s pretty recent, that kind of revisionism where you’re going back. Modern readers are too sensitive to hear the word fat, so you have to go and take it out again. The book was actually written in late 2019 and I didn’t actually get it published until early 2021. It was pre-COVID. The trend that we’ve got now with revising existing texts hadn’t happened yet. Although that’s always been kind of going on. I mean, in 1984 [book] you had Winston character, his job was to memory hole things that had been made illegal by the government. That sort of concept. It still kind of happens. You just eliminate stories you don’t want. And it occurred to me that if I was going to have the device of men and women are kept apart legally in order to avoid trouble and if you were trying to avoid them trying to jump fences and get back at each other. You would have to teach the young boys well, not teach them that girls didn’t exist, but you’d have to teach them in a way that girls were never part of the equation. There couldn’t be any knights and shining armor saving fair damsels, because there you have men and women doing things together. And for that matter, you couldn’t have mothers and fathers because there you have men and women doing things together. So there was a necessity by that rule of separation to rewrite as much as you could so that boys don’t grow up learning about girls in any particular way. They don’t see them, they don’t talk to them, they don’t have any stories about girls, so they’re just a complete unknown. And the same with girls. Now, once you become sort of in the ruling elite, you’re aware of the male population as your slave minion worker types. That elimination of any kind of cultural awareness or interaction with each other. So it wasn’t so much for sensitivity, so much as you had to eliminate anything that suggested men and women getting together in any particular way.

Brian Hawkins [00:07:28]:

Yeah, by doing that, that eliminates competing priorities and loyalties from the ruling class or the government.

Mic Roland [00:07:34]:

We still see a sort of movement to that, like with Biden’s recent comment that they’re not your children. They belong to everyone. Loyalty to family. If you’ve got a mother and a father and children are loyal and they love each other, and yet that kind of family love competes with the state. And for the state to really be supreme, you have to get rid of that. Otherwise, you’ve got a competing loyalty, and they don’t want any of that.

Brian Hawkins [00:07:56]:

So in the story, everyone lives in one of seven cities worldwide, one in each continent, two in Asia, I think you said. To protect the environment. Do you see today’s environmental agenda as a threat to freedom and liberty, or is that where you see the worst-case scenario going?

Mic Roland [00:08:09]:

Yeah, I think I do with the idea of the 15-minute cities that sort of push by the environmental movement to get everybody in a city so that the world can be safe and free from all those nasty, contaminating humans. The idea of everybody living in a city came from mental experiment with if you took all the world’s population and you put them in one densely packed urban environment, how big would that be? And I was surprised how small a city would have to be. If you put all 8 billion people in the same place, it would take up something about the size of Texas. And that would mean if you had all 8 billion in Texas, then the whole rest of the planet would have no people in it. So the greenies would be happy with that because now the earth is safe, and they’ve got everybody in a controlled environment where they can control it, and so the earth is better. So I wove that into the story as part of the impetus. That Great Triumph that I spoke of was where they got the governmental authority to be able to build these seven cities and to, and first entice people into them and then force people into them and then make it illegal to live outside of them so that they had everybody in a tight little box that they could control. And nature gets to run wild and be free. Well, I mean, we even see it with well, not necessarily World Economic Forum, but some of those speakers who they talk about how humans are the problem and if you could just get rid of the humans, then the Earth would be a nice place. Although I’m not sure who’s enjoying it. Once you’ve gotten rid of the humans. But that seems to be the preoccupation, is get the humans out of there. Some of it was just taking what I had seen as current trends, like with the MeToo thing and just saying if we run it all the way out into the future, where it’s sort of finally actualized, what would that really look like? And that’s where you end up with the world of the City Book [Escape From The City], a lot of what we see as kind of common trends, if you run it all the way out to its logical conclusion, that’s kind of what you’re going to get.

Brian Hawkins [00:10:00]:

Food and money are taken care of for the citizens inside the city. Everyone wears visors for tracking, learning, communication, and even punishment. This is a method of control for the city rulers. Did you have a mark of the beast in the back of your mind when you implemented that into the story and made you go with Visors instead of the traditional method of embedded chip?

Mic Roland [00:10:19]:

Well, that was an extrapolation off of that Google Oculus where there was supposed to be those glasses that were going to be kind of like your cell phone that you wear, and all the data would come up on there, and basically, it’d be like a hands-free phone with a heads up display that you wear. And that seemed like next logical technological step to that, have a cell phone in your pocket is put that cell phone Visor thing on your head so that it’s all now hands-free. And that would function as your sort of information portal for just about everything. You wouldn’t have to learn how to read, you wouldn’t have to do much of anything because all of the information went a little bit like we have with our younger generations that don’t necessarily read that much. They get everything in the form of videos. The Visor was more of a two-way communication with the rest of their society and the government, like with the health bot that kept nagging him, it becomes a way for the government to be giving you pop-up commercials constantly. So that’s why a Visor you had to be able to see that kind of communication rather than just a chip to track you. Now it did have that because it had a little chip implanted in their temple which was kind of the biomarker that could give feedback as to how you were feeling and where you were. That was why visors,

Brian Hawkins [00:11:30]:

That’s [Google Glasses] just another one of Google’s failed endeavors. I forgot all about those. There was really no thought about being representing the mark of the beast or anything like any type of religion?

Mic Roland [00:11:40]:

Not particularly. I mean, after you’ve read the book of Revelation, it’s hard to not think of it. It wasn’t trying to be an analogy of the mark of the beast because I didn’t have an antichrist, and I didn’t have a beast or a statue for people to worship. So as a biblical parallel, it wasn’t very close.

Brian Hawkins [00:11:56]:

Yeah, that was just something that came to my mind while I was reading it. So even though men and women were kept separate and the interaction between the two sexes were basically illegal, the government added something to the water like you just mentioned, to keep people docile and obedient. Can you imagine anything like that ever being implemented? Like maybe adding fluoride or water? You think the government would actually do something like that?

Mic Roland [00:12:15]:

I don’t know why they wouldn’t actually. I think if you give them a half a chance they think it was a great idea since a lot of the unelected agency types imagine that they’re doing all of what they’re doing for our own good. I could see that sneaking through and just being done because well, we don’t have to ask any approval because they’re all idiots and they won’t approve it. So we’re just going to do it, and it’s for their own good.

Brian Hawkins [00:12:37]:

Procreation is a function of the government doesn’t really state it in the book, but I’m assuming that was like the people or babies were developed in a lab. Did that idea come from gene therapy?

Mic Roland [00:12:47]:

No, it actually came more from – you’re right about them being created in a lab. It’s more like in vitro fertilization would be how the two components are put together. In the book. there were sort of the lower classes of women. I don’t know if you remember that part, that there were carriers, which were basically surrogate women or surrogate mothers. So their job as this lowest class of women was just to be walking wombs. That’s where the in vitro fertilized eggs were implanted. Their job was just to give birth. And then there was the next tier up class of women. Still on the lower end were the tenders, and their job was the nurturing of the babies once born. So the carrier that bore the baby didn’t get to take care of it because, again, the government’s trying to break that kind of family bond. You can’t have a mother and child bond. So the child would be born of one of the carriers. She would go back and go get pregnant again, and the tender would take care of the baby up until age one or two. And then they would be separated into boys kindergarten, girls kindergarten, and then they would never see each other again.

Brian Hawkins [00:13:52]:

Yeah, I was kind of like thinking with the different levels of hierarchy, you could design the babies to be grown as lower intelligence to fit that.

Mic Roland [00:14:00]:

Yeah, that’s actually certainly plausible that the ruling elites might have well, not quite like the queen bee with royal jelly. They might be doing some gene therapy things so that if they need a couple dozen more carriers to be walking wombs, well, they just grow a few more of those with whoever they are as babies. Their fate is destined from the beginning, which was kind of the case with the main character, Ford. He was created to be a worker bee, and that was about it. His life was just to be a worker. So he could very well have been gene engineered to be that and not much more. Of course, in the story, it’s a little hard to completely oppress humanity. So a little bit of that independence and spunk in the main character kind of leaks out, especially once he gets off the water.

Brian Hawkins [00:14:45]:

So, like you mentioned, you wrote the book in 2019. So if you were right to Escape From The City today, what would you change, or would you change it or add anything?

Mic Roland [00:14:54]:

It occurred to me after other readers had commented on the book that I might need to explain that separation of the sexes more, because there were some readers that really had a hard time imagining the main character not having any idea what to do with a woman. That was probably because I didn’t explain it well enough, that little boys that have grown up never hearing about girls, never knowing that there were mothers or sisters or just even playmates who were girls. If you never grew up with one, how would you automatically know all of the stuff that my confused male readers seem to assume. That because they know it, that it’s universal knowledge. Not necessarily. A lot of what we pick up on, we’ve been learning even as little kids. If you’re looking at Dick and Jane run, Jane run, you’re learning about Dick and Jane at the same time. So if you eliminate all of that, you’ve eliminated quite a bit. Now, of course, I’ve also got the main character, Ford. After he gets off of the city water, some of those hormonal urges, or at least the human instinct for male and female to be together starts to surface, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. To him, it’s all a total whacked-out mystery. Why is he interested in this Ada? He doesn’t know, but he is. So that’s that suppressed humanity coming out. But now you’ve got somebody that’s feeling something. But they’ve had no owner’s manual and no training, so of course, he has no idea. Now he’ll find out. But that’s kind of where that came from. So, yeah, I would probably change that to explain it a little better because, apparently, I didn’t do a good enough job the first time I understood it.

Brian Hawkins [00:16:26]:

But I’m right there in the same boat. I don’t know what to do with a woman either.

Mic Roland [00:16:30]:

[Laughing] Well, that comes with age. When you’re young, you think you know, but after you’ve been a little older, you think, nope, I don’t know what to do. That other thing I might add to the story might be a little more pervasive. Government surveillance. I had the chip in their head and their visors as a way of seeing what they see and knowing where they were as a tracker thing. And I had the facial recognition cameras all over the place. But I might add a little more because obviously with our social credit scores and license plate scanners and all kinds of other stuff, the government’s got a lot more tools for that than I had imagined at the time.

Brian Hawkins [00:17:06]:

This is one of my favorite books. Not of what you wrote, but period, mostly because the direction we’re moving right now, the ending, where we’re headed, sadly.

Mic Roland [00:17:14]:

Yeah, it could turn into that.

Brian Hawkins [00:17:16]:

This is as good to me as 1984. I know that sounds crazy. That would upset a lot of people, but because it’s more modern, a little bit of advantage when it do current events than a guy that wrote that. When did he write that?

Mic Roland [00:17:26]:

That was 1948.

Brian Hawkins [00:17:28]:

Yeah, way before 1984. So the 1984 was his version of the future. Do you think that most people today would not only accept the concept of easy living with a government controlled city like that, where everything’s taken care of, but you don’t have any responsibilities other than to do what you’re told. Do you think people would actually prefer that right now when it comes to the struggles that come with freedom?

Mic Roland [00:17:48]:

Well, sadly, I think they would. We’ve been seeing a lot of times that the government will encroach. I mean, COVID was certainly the best test case of that. The government just had to say, for your own good, you have to do all of this stuff. And 98% of the people said okay and did it. Granted, after a while they chafed at it and complained a little, but I noticed how quickly almost everybody jumped in. And it wasn’t until much later that urge for freedom pushed back. The sort of sad truth of it is, I guess I see our culture. Maybe it’s just the American culture. It’s hard to talk about what happens with Zulus or Inuit, but with our culture, we’ve been increasingly citified with each generation. So that the way people live. Well, people talk about, oh, if the grid goes down, we’ll be thrown back into the eighteen hundreds, as if that was one of Dante’s levels of hell. Now people were alive in the eighteen hundreds. They seemed kind of happy, actually. The cityfied nature has been growing with each generation. I mean, sure, you probably run into that, too, where you can reminisce to the youth about how in the old days, there was just one phone hanging on the wall, and if you wanted to call somebody, you had to go stand by the wall and talk to them. And if they called and you weren’t there, too bad for you. I mean, the whole concept of not cell phones is so alien now that you start to feel old, like even remembering before there were computers, kids now they really can’t imagine there was ever a life without that. So with each generation getting more and more cityfied, I think that urge to sort of never mind about my freedom because it’s a whole lot more work, it’s a whole lot easier just to have the city provide everything I need. And I guess I’ll sit around and be entertained. Seems like a trend that’s been growing rather than fading.

Brian Hawkins [00:19:29]:

The idea of a book is full of encyclopedias and a dictionary and a Bible is a foreign concept.

Mic Roland [00:19:34]:

Yeah, sadly, I bought a set of encyclopedias for my kids when they were young, and that was in the early 1990s. So guess what blew that away?

Brian Hawkins [00:19:42]:

Apple.

Mic Roland [00:19:42]:

Yeah, and I’ve still got the encyclopedias. I think I opened one of them once.

Brian Hawkins [00:19:47]:

Those might come in handy someday.

Mic Roland [00:19:49]:

Yeah, I see that kind of trend as headed for that nowadays. It seems all the more plausible, a little bit like the World Economic Forum and their motto from a couple of years ago about, you will own nothing and you’ll be happy. They see people headed that way and they’re kind of planning for it. We’re not going to do anything for ourselves and we’ll be basically clueless, which is a good way to control people, if they’re clueless.

Brian Hawkins [00:20:09]:

Without going into the whole conspiracy thing with the AI and job loss and quiet quitting and all that we see right now. Just universal basic income that they talk about that sounds appealing to people. I don’t have to go to work and I get paid.

Mic Roland [00:20:23]:

Fallen human nature is lazy, and if you can appeal to that laziness even the Hebrews, when they were freed from Egypt, they’re out there in the wilderness headed for the promise land. First couple of hard days are going, let’s go back to Egypt and be slaves. Because at least they had cucumbers. I mean, they were willing to be slaves for cucumbers, for crying out loud.

Brian Hawkins [00:20:41]:

Fear is a huge motivator as well.

Mic Roland [00:20:43]:

Well, that’s a good way to get the animal in the barn, but then once you got them in the barn, well, now you can control them.

Brian Hawkins [00:20:49]:

See, I could go so many different directions with that. With the media and everything, I’ll just move on. So this is actually the final question. What survival lessons will readers gain from reading Escape From The City?

Mic Roland [00:20:58]:

The chain gang of city boys who are all in their 20s, let’s say. Whey’re relatively young. When they crash out into the woods, they’ve got to survive from scratch. They had their older boss [99], the guy who was in charge of the chain gang. He ends up dying. Before he died, he had shown Ford a couple of tricks, like using the Taser cattle prod to start a fire and a few of other kind of survivaly things so that when the boys are on their own out there, Ford knows how to make fire, so they can make fire. They salvage fabric from their aircraft so that they could make tents or blankets for themselves. So those kind of survival tips of if you were crashed in the woods, what would you do? Those are in there. And of course, that doesn’t hurt to eventually be adopted by a group of local natives.

Brian Hawkins [00:21:45]:

And you’re stealing those blackberries, so there’s a lesson right there. One of them, I can’t remember his name now, he ate bad berries, got really sick.

Mic Roland [00:21:53]:

Oh, yeah, Toos, they called him, because his number was 22. And all of the characters end up liking to give themselves names instead of numbers, which is, again, that sort of instinct or urge to be human as opposed to just a cog in the machine. So they all end up adopting names. But yeah, that was Toos that ate the bad berries and thought he was going to die.

Brian Hawkins [00:22:12]:

They learned to catch some fish.

Mic Roland [00:22:14]:

So, yeah, there were kind of rustic survival lessons that way. I just had clueless city boys doing them, learning kind of by trial and error, really.

Brian Hawkins [00:22:22]:

The entire story is about survival, surviving and escaping. Like in the title, I would have probably just stayed with Ivy and not worried about Ada at that point.

Mic Roland [00:22:32]:

[Laughing] Well, yeah, if you’re going to get rescued, being rescued by shapely natives is not a terrible fate.

Brian Hawkins [00:22:38]:

People are going to have to go read the book to see what we’re talking about.

Mic Roland [00:22:42]:

Yeah. Well, there you go. I wouldn’t discourage that.

Brian Hawkins [00:22:44]:

Any final thoughts or comments or anything you want to mention?

Mic Roland [00:22:47]:

No, I don’t think so. We covered a fair amount of ground. How about you? I was going to ask you, when you say it’s one of your favorite books, why is that?

Brian Hawkins [00:22:54]:

I think because it touches on what we’re witnessing in real life today, but at a distance that allows everybody to come up with their own opinions. So you’re not really like – I have a tendency to come out and say things like World Economic Forum or some of the things that I just talked about. And you keep that very generic and that’s smart too, because that’s going to appeal to both left, right, the middle and independent, all that stuff, if you’re going to make it political. And that’s what you didn’t do. You kept politics out of it in and your own personal opinion and kind of just put it out there and let people come to their own conclusions as far as what could happen. And to me, it was like it’s a story that hopefully doesn’t come true, but it seems like kind of like down the path we’re on, right now

Mic Roland [00:23:34]:

Yeah, it kind of does. So did you prefer the more optimistic ending? Not to give it away, but…

Brian Hawkins [00:23:41]:

Yeah. And I know there’s another book coming too. I don’t know if I should have mentioned that. I think the ending – it was good. I mean, you left it open. It’s for the reader to think about. Kind of like a season finale.

Mic Roland [00:23:52]:

I’ve had a couple of other readers that have chastised me for the ending because they thought it just ended too soon. They wanted to know more. Well, that’s good because then you’ll want the sequel.

Brian Hawkins [00:24:02]:

I hope it turns into five, six or eight books that you end up doing with the New Hampshire series.

Mic Roland [00:24:07]:

Yeah, well, we’ll see. The second book that I’ve been working on for the outline of it kind of has its own tangent to go on and that may in itself suggest a third book once I get into it because I did try to lay seeds for the second book when writing the first one. So it’s not going to be a non-sequitur. There’ll be things that in the second book you go, oh, yeah, that did happen in the first one. There’s a connection. They’re not going to be just City One and City Two entitle only.

Brian Hawkins [00:24:32]:

Once you get a handful of those books, I’ll reach out to my vast network of contacts and see if we can’t get a network series going out of it.

Mic Roland [00:24:39]:

All right, well, you start priming the pump.

Brian Hawkins [00:24:42]:

All right. So how can people follow you and get a copy of Escape From The City?

Mic Roland [00:24:45]:

Well, it’s available on Amazon. Actually, all the books are available on Amazon because that’s how I self-publish. So you can look for the author, Mic Roland, and I even have my product placement object right there. That’s what it looks like. You can look for Escape From The City by the title or look for Mic Roland. It should show up in a list in there on Amazon. It’s both paperback, which you just saw, or as Kindle.

Brian Hawkins [00:25:10]:

And I got it on Kindle. And if you’re new to Kindle, it also has this where you can listen to it. I actually just connect it to some earbuds and then I like to listen and read at the same time. Now, if you had it on Audible, you can purchase the Audible as well on the Kindle and you can play the Audible version and it will highlight the word.

Mic Roland [00:25:30]:

Heard of that, but I’ve never actually seen it in operation.

Brian Hawkins [00:25:33]:

All right, so I guess we’ll close this out. Anything else before I say goodbye to everybody?

Mic Roland [00:25:37]:

No, I think we’ve covered quite a bit of ground.

Brian Hawkins [00:25:40]:

Okay. This is Brian Hawkins. Next Step Survival. And you’ve been here with Mic Roland from Mic-Roland.com. Yeah. I highly recommend his book. Like I said, it is one of my favorite books.

Mic Roland [00:25:50]:

Well, I appreciate you taking the time, Brian.

Brian Hawkins [00:25:52]:

No problem. Nice talking to you again. All right. Bye.