Dan Sugralinov, author of Disgardium, Level Up and World 99 series. Due to the upcoming release of Resistance (Disgardium 4 - April 29, 2020) we talked to Dan about the series, his writing methods and asked if there will be Level Up-4 anytime soon. Btw, audiobook Disgardium 3 is releasing April 28, 2020!
The
world of Disgardium, isn’t it some sort of totalitarian dystopia? It's a rather
harsh world, whatever it is. Do you think it's a logical consequence of humanity’s
development?
That’s a good question, you know.
Here’s what’s happening in the world right now: all of the countries have
announced a stay-at-home order, a quarantine, state of emergency and whatnot.
And as soon as it happened, everybody promptly forgot about such things as
human rights. Because it’s in humanity’s interests to prevent the entire
population from catching the virus, at least all at the same time, because that
would mean the collapse of our entire medical system. If some of the forecasts do
come true and the planet’s population reaches 20 billion – then even if we find
enough food for us all (because there’re already certain advances made in the
area of synthetic food production) and despite the fact that the growing and
culling of a single cow does more harm to the environment than public transportation
– we’ll still be killing our planet. And 20 billion people will be killing it
not three times faster than we do now, but probably ten times faster. So it
just begs for some people to develop those ideas, you know, that although all
human beings are equal, some of them are bound to be more equal than others, if
you know what I mean. Sooner or later, the proverbial movers and shakers are
obliged to arrive at this idea – provided they haven’t done so already. Don’t
get me wrong, it’s not as if I’m a conspiracy freak in a tinfoil hat, so I
really don’t think that this is the case – but still I do believe that if one
day humanity faces a overpopulation threat, that might call for some very
unpopular measures, including the restriction of human rights for certain
categories of population. In which case the assignment of such categories might
become the biggest bone of contention in society. Which is exactly what happens
in Disgardium. You’d think they did the right thing, creating a system where
the life of an uneducated, lazy, alcoholic person is of a much lower value to
society than, say, that of a Nobel laureate in physics. But on the other hand,
we shouldn’t forget the human factor – naturally, the top-category citizens
will make sure they get the right to assign the same status and privileges to
their families regardless of their value.
