“There’s always the scene in the James Bond movies where Bond goes back to his hotel room and there’s a beautiful woman in his bed. Now, I’ve stayed at a lot of hotels, and this never happened to me, not once, but I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if it did? Wouldn’t it be fun to have this story about a young engineer, which is what I was when I first thought of this, who keeps getting himself into these kind of James Bond situations – he gets in a shootout or a car chase or he comes back to his apartment and his beautiful upstairs neighbor is in his bed?”
“A lot of it has to do with political correctness. Bond sleeps around, he shoots things, he blows stuff up, he used to smoke, he drinks heavily, and none of that is politically correct anymore.”
“One of the things I did try to do in this book is kind of capture the spirit of the early James Bond movies.”
“Who doesn’t want to be James Bond?”
“I wanted to have the heroine of the book be a lady wrestler. I thought that would be a fun thing to have.”
“When you don’t have freedom in your society, you lose the opportunities to excel.”
“If [Dinesh d’Souza’s movie] is about 2016, Full Asylum is ten years after that. What I project is continued loss of freedom, continued economic stagnation, a nanny state absolutely out of control, cameras in the cafeteria checking to make sure you don’t eat anything unhealthy, and I’m not even going to go into what I did with airport security, but it involves a privacy curtain and a rubber glove.”
Terry: Did you see some parallels between the future in your book and Atlas Shrugged II?
Mike: It’s very different because my book is a comedy.
“You cannot have a modern technological society with a high standard of living if you don’t have freedom.”
“If you look at history, capitalism, freedom, and the technological flowering that we’ve had in the last two centuries have all gone hand in hand.”
“The founding fathers that created this country were pretty smart guys and they designed a system that’s very difficult to destroy.”
“The years ahead are going to be rough. It’s definitely a good time for me to be starting a career as a dystopian novelist, but I do think that truth is on our side.”
“The reason that authors get so many rejection letters is they don’t do their homework: they don’t look for a publisher that’s a good match for their book.”
“The publishing world is run by liberals…nobody’s doing conservative and libertarian fiction…I decided I wanted to be the one that fills that niche, so I started the Monteferro Press.”
Terry: I notice your writing style is very visual…
Mike: That’s ‘cause I grew up watching television.
“I didn’t sit down and say that I’m going to write a conservative book or a Tea Party book, I sat down and said I’m going to write a book that I want to read.”
“Some of my characters, Cheri Tarte in particular, are far less polite than I am, so I can say things that I would never say in my own voice.”
Terry: I kind of like the hippie character a lot.
Mike: If you’re going to have any kind of stock character like a hippie, you have to have a twist, and in this case, he’s a hippie, but he’s a hippie for the Right.
And here’s the full interview…
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Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about politics, hospital gowns, and freedom.
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