Superhero Ethics

The man who helped design the surveillance state is perfectly fine with it—until his daughter calls covered in blood with a dead boyfriend on the floor. The Price of Safety, Michael C. Bland’s award-winning sci-fi novel, is set in 2047, where cameras are everywhere, your optics can be hacked, and the system was built by someone who genuinely thought he was keeping people safe. Matthew sits down with Michael to ask the question the book won’t let you avoid: how much liberty are we actually willing to trade for safety—and what happens when the people holding the keys decide your freedom is the price?They dig into the mechanics of how surveillance reshapes behavior (the terror isn’t being watched—it’s not knowing when), why grief and helplessness after loss quietly raise our tolerance for control, and how every character in the book, including the ones doing terrible things, genuinely believes they’re the hero of their own story. Michael also shares the moment his fictional DNA scanner turned real: he wrote it i