Bookwild - The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar: Seeing the Future and Challenging Morality

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

This week, I talk with Alexander Boldizar about his new thriller The Man Who Saw Seconds.  We dive into the gray areas of morality, the vulnerabilities of government structures and the willingness to do anything for the people you love.  The Man Who Saw Seconds SynopsisPreble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future.Otherwise, he lives an ordinary life. But when a confrontation with a cop on a New York City subway goes tragically wrong, those seconds give Preble the chance to dodge a bullet—causing another man to die in his place. Government agencies become aware of Preble’s gift, a manhunt ensues, and their ambitions shift from law enforcement to military R&D. Preble will do whatever it takes to protect his family, but as events spiral out of control, he must weigh the cost of his gift against the loss of his humanity. A breathless thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page, The Man Who Saw Seconds explores the nature of time, the brain as a prediction machine, and the tension between the individual and the systems we create. Alexander Boldizar provides an adrenaline-pumping read that will leave you contemplating love, fear and the abyss.   Get Bookwild MerchCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackCheck Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck out the Imposter Hour Podcast with Liz and GregFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrian 

Today I'm talking with Alexander Bouldezar, who is the author of The Man Who Saw Seconds, which was just an extremely thought-provoking time-bending book that I read recently that I really, really enjoyed. And it is about Preble Jefferson who can see five seconds into the future. Otherwise, he lives in ordinary life. But when a confrontation with a cop on a New York City subway goes tragically wrong, those seconds give Preble the chance to dodge a bullet, causing another man to die in his place. Government agencies become aware of Preble's gift, a manhunt ensues, and their ambitions shift from law enforcement to military R&D. Preble will do whatever it takes to protect his family, but as events spiral out of control, he must weigh the cost of his gift

against the loss of his humanity. A breathless thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page, the man who saw seconds explores the nature of time, the brain as a prediction machine, and the tension between the individual and the systems that we create. You really don't want to know much more than that, but it really does dive into how we kind of bend morality to match our motivations and what the cost of doing that looks like, as well as examining how government systems work and some of their vulnerabilities. So let's get into it. When I was reading your author bio, I think it was maybe one of the most unique bios that I've ever read.

And obviously you know all of this. But for the listeners, you have been an art gallery director in Bali, an attorney in San Francisco and Prague, a pseudo-gatia in Japan, a hermit in Tennessee, a paleontologist in the Sahara, a porter in the high Arctic, a consultant on Wall Street, an art critic out of Jakarta and Singapore, and a police abuse watchdog, and Times Square billboard writer in New York City. So amidst all of those things, when did you know that you wanted to write a book and how did all of those experiences kind of shape what you write?

Well, I was an attorney for 11 months. I'm a member of the California bar, but I realized very early on that it wasn't for me. So I've been in recovery ever since. I was actually even before that, even in law school, I started writing for a school paper. I became the chief editorial columnist. And it was a law school paper, but I was writing things in haiku and Dr. Sue's poetry and just playing with experimental writing. with experimental writing. So every column I play with a different style and different, just just playing with words. And that was just, that's with my personality is so much better than

actual law. So when I, when I became a lawyer, I already had the intention of doing it just to save up a nest egg. My plan was three years, save up enough that I could, you know, switch careers. And after 11 months, I was married to an artist at the time and hanging in. out with artists in San Francisco Art Institute. And it was just so jarring. My day job, 15 hours a day, working for a white shoe law firm that was doing international corporate law. And then coming home and these parties with artists.

And it was like, I can't keep doing this. So I left a firm and we moved to Bali where I end up running an art gallery just. to help pay the bills. It was a big Italian-owned art gallery. You know, sent, sent very successful. It sent artists to the Venezuel, to the Miami Basel. And then through that, I became an art critic because all the Italians are terrible. There are artists where there were usually Italian artists in an Indonesian art gallery. Nobody spoke English properly. And I got to a point where I was rewriting everybody's artist statements and then I got

asked by an art magazine that was forming out of Singapore and Jakarta. They did it two locations. They were starting a pan-Asian art magazine in English. And so they asked me to become a contributor. And I started writing a monthly column, this kind of cultural criticism. And so I've kind of drifted all over. I've worked as a journalist for the global mail and other newspapers and magazines just trying to pay the bills without being a lawyer.

But the thing I always wanted to write was fiction. It's just, it's hard to make a living off of fiction. Right. So writing has kind of tied in most of those jobs with a few exceptions. Like in Japan, that wasn't to do with writing. But even the paleontology, I went to the high Arctic, an article on spec for National Geographic. But then, you know, there's a small team, so I had to basically help as a team member. and I wasn't a paleontologist, but I was big and strong.

I could lift and carry things. Yeah. I was on an expedition to Sahara. That was also with the Discovery Channel. And so it was all kind of tied into writing in New York. Yeah. Civil Complaint Review Board. I was a speech writer for the Civil and Complaint Review Board.

So I wasn't actually an investigator of bad cops. I just beaches the City Council. So that's one of the beauties of writing. It can take you all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. That is really cool. So when you started writing fiction, you had a book you wrote before the man who saw seconds.

What did your, like, what is your writing process like? Do you plot it out? Do you just kind of start writing and then follow where you're going? Or how do you approach it? I actually changed between the ugly, my previous book and this one. I changed both genres because that was literary fiction. This is science fiction with some literary elements, I guess. Yeah.

But I also changed how my writing process. So for the ugly, it really was kind of just letting the book take me where it wanted to go. And then spending 16 years trying to bring it back under control. And I thought, okay, that's not a viable process. So for the men who saw seconds, it was more structured. I mean, I knew the first scene actually came to me in a dream, weirdly enough. And I was able to lose a dream for many years. So every time I went to sleep, I put myself in a state where I would try to start the dream where I left off from the previous night.

And it kind of worked. Basically the subway scene, the very first opening scene of the book came to me in a dream. Of course, I fleshed it out and I made sure it didn't feel like a dream because there's no saying I had a dream was a reader. And then I knew the general themes I wanted to convey and I kind of knew that I wanted to keep escalating. I didn't want to let the main character or the antagonist. I didn't want anybody off the hook. So I wanted to just keep escalating and escalating. And so I had kind of an architecture.

I wasn't 100% sure the very very end how it was going to go, but I knew that I wanted to just keep escalating and see where that would take it. But the structure was much more. I had much more in the armature before I started with this one. Yeah. Because it's a much easier process on the author to know where you're going. And I think it ends up creating a more coherent book. yeah yeah it definitely is a book that could be described as constantly escalating so you definitely

feel that the whole time that you're reading it um so you kind of knew like the themes you wanted to get into and kind of where you wanted to start how did you get to know your i mean preble is the main character for the most part but how did you get to know your characters that would kind of fit the plot. Well, I knew that the book, it was kind of one of the themes was this idea of one man against all the security organs of the state, all the government agencies. And so that's in part his slim superpower is just enough to kind of even the odds between you know, him and the country as a whole.

Yeah. And I knew that I didn't want to be political as the voice of the book, but I wanted to have some, you know, some ideas bouncing off each other. And so characters like Fish, I think if he had been the main character, it wouldn't have worked. But having him as a psychic with his kind of, you know, the anarchist law professor, I could bring in some of my, some of the things I disliked about the law. when I was a lawyer, give it to fish.

Yeah. I felt like giving something like that to the main character would be too heavy-handed, whereas giving those ideas to a sidekick lets the author kind of, let's the reader make their own judgments of how they feel more easily. Like I really, I'm a big believer in openness with an art.

Since we started talking about, you know, the art gallery, one of the things that made Rembrandt, So, especially his later work so compelling to viewers was this loose brushstrokes, which I kind of allowed the viewer in. And within visual art, it's true within visual art, it's true within writing. I think the artist or the writer needs to leave room for the readers to enter. And so I'm not, like that kind of openness to me is very, very important, both in visual art and in writing. And so I didn't want to give any kind of conclusions. I don't want to tell the reader how to think.

But I do want to frame the questions in an interesting way so that the reader can decide, I mean, at what point is probably taking it too far. And it's been really interesting to see how different readers reached that point at completely different stages. I did. In other words, recently where the person told me that they were with him the whole time. And so it's,

It is really, really interesting to me to see that difference. And I don't want to set that difference. I don't want to reveal where I think that point is because as an author, it would have too much weight. And so I think that's how to create kind of a dialogue with your reader, even though obviously I can't really talk to them usually. Right. That to me is more interesting than telling people what I think. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely what made the book so interesting to read because he probably is the main character, but you do have chapters or scenes with when you're kind of in the perspective of people from the side of the law.

And the whole time, I mean, I was definitely with him. I understood both sides, I think is what made it complicated and kind of uncomfortable sometimes because you, when you're with one character, you understand their. motivations. And then if you're with another one, you understand their motivations as well. So it does make it very conflicting, but it forces you to think about a lot of the issues for sure. And I read in your acknowledgment that like some of the inspiration from this book came from a time when your son was actually abducted. And so can you talk about how like that helpless feeling kind of transformed into this book. Yeah.

I mean, as I mentioned, the acknowledgement, that's one of the amazing, one of the wonderful things of being a writer is that you can take the most horrible experiences in your life and turn them into something positive. Yeah. Or at least interesting. Yeah, he was only abducted for five days, but it was, it was. I had two really horrible times in my life. One was when that happened, one was my wife died of cancer.

And so a lot of that, that energy that is behind preble, even though obviously the scenes are not from my real life. I don't have superpowers. I've never fought the cops. The emotional energy definitely came from that hopeless feeling of trying to protect your family. and in the case of my son, everything turned out very well. There was no long-term harm. You know, it was, everything worked out, even though I actually had the enamel on 14 teeth melted during that time.

I went to a dentist, and the dentist told me that you can clench your jaw to such an extent that it changes the chemical composition of the enamel. And so my teeth melted from stress. Oh, my God. I didn't know that could happen. to me. Yeah. Yeah.

And so there was definitely that that emotional drive to try to get your son back, protect your family and get your son back. That came from a real emotional experience. But again, the actual... I didn't mind the book for experiences,

but I did mind it for emotional. emotional kind of fuel. I kind of like to think of the emotional themes and the intellectual themes as kind of the two wings that can help a story kind of get beyond just a very superficial, simple story. And I also wrote the book that if somebody wants to enjoy it just as a thriller, it's totally there just as a thriller. They can enjoy it like a Hollywood movie. I want to work on that level. But I also believe that book can kind of go further if it's got both an emotional and into the, like, component. So the emotional stuff definitely came from that experience with my son and partially

the, you know, with my wife dying of cancer. But less so because that was already, I was only at the revision stage at that point. And then the intellectual stuff came from just kind of wanting to bounce different ideas against each other, you know, both having been born a communist this country where the state controlled everything, down to every detail of your life. And kind of investing in, you know, what does freedom mean? You know, because like people, people throw the word around so easily on all sides of the political spectrum, but it, like to me in the end, freedom's openness. And even Preble himself, I have this idea that that kind of came in through, through fish, but I,

I do believe that institutions, as they get bigger, end up working against the purpose for which they were created. And if you hyper-focus on any one agenda, even something as important as protecting your family, that hyper-focused on thing, it can become counterproductive to the very thing you're trying to achieve. And that's why I mean, if there's one overarching message in terms of my own mindset of what freedom means and it's openness. And you can see that with, you know, big man kind of getting obsessed with catching Preble and pulling out all the stops,

like the whole society kind of goes crazy. Preble's single-mindedness, like everything becomes kind of productive because it's taken too far. Yes. Yeah, that's like, as I was reading, it was making me really think about like, even from the perspective of Preble

trying to protect his family, you almost start to wonder if like really big consuming love ends up being dangerous as well because he's so willing to justify any of his actions in the name of that basically. So is that something you were even kind of trying to explore as well? Yeah, just just, you know, the old saying from Nietzsche that he's staring in the Biss long enough, the Bist stares back. Like when you fight monsters, you become a monster. And I don't know, I do think that the world is becoming, everything is becoming so extreme somehow in the real world that I kind of want to play with that idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So you mentioned it really does explore government structures and kind of like their vulnerabilities as well. So the beginning of the book even kicks off with Preble just kind of like wanting to exercise as well. right to not have something be searched. And so there's a quote there where it says it went like this since law has just failed power, the fewer people who believe in the rule of the law, the more transparent the veil, and the more the law has to obey its own rules in order to maintain legitimacy. The more people who believe in the rule of the law, the less likely it is to actually exist. So that's like his motivation. But then when we're on the side of the law, or the military. They're basically taught to just like follow orders without questioning anything and kind of

told that that's like what keeps the system working. But then there's kind of a downfall if they're getting like really corrupted orders as well. So do you think there's room for like human discretion on the side of the law that doesn't hinder the citizens that it's trying to protect? Or is it just kind of a human problem at large? Yeah, I definitely think that, I mean, there's a tension. Again, there are both sides of the argument there because on the one hand, the more discretion cops have, for example, then, you know, if they're racist or they're biased or they have, you know, personal agendas, then the more discretion they have, the more they can abuse their power. But at the same time, yeah.

The fear of that sometimes has taken us to a point where we lose the human element. And when the law, the more the law becomes like a machine, the more stupid it becomes, in a sense. The less it's able to, because the law as a structure has to think ahead of time what is right and wrong. And the human situations and encounters are, they're complex. and no law can think ahead of time all the possible variations of what a real system I mean what a real situation could look like

the context basically and so you see you see like the US is particularly far on that machine side of the law whereas you know if you're in the Holland for my son's studying in Holland right now so I'm spending a while time in Amsterdam the police

there have a very kind of common sense gray. There's a lot of gray area where they just kind of, you know, if they see a kid doing something stupid, they're not going to give them a criminal record for life. They'll just kind of scare them a little bit and try to set them on the right path. They'll act almost like parents or it's just much more reasonable standard. And I remember one of the things, because I lived in the U.S. for 10 years.

And when I left, the thing that I kind of, there's a lot of love about the U.S. But the thing that I liked about leaving the U.S. was the fact that there were gray areas again. Like, there's something human about gray areas. And, you know, the thing that always struck me when I came into the U.S., even here in Canada, you know, buses or trains will say, please share the seat with a pregnant woman. Or if you see a pregnant woman, please give up your seat. In the U.S., it will say, give up your seat to a pregnant moment, it's the law.

Like instead of just, okay, let's just be human and decent and reasonable. Obviously, if I see somebody who needs to seek more to me, as a decent human being, I should give it up. Without having to bring in, you know, the power of the police into it. And it's a really big marker where the U.S. is different from the rest of the world. The U.S., everything's black and white. And in most of the rest of the world, there's a lot more tolerance for gray areas. And for gray areas, you need people with discretion. That means you need a more educated pool from which you draw your police officers.

It means you need to pay better salaries to police officers. So you get, you know, in New York City, when the NYPD tried to require a university degree for their cops, they couldn't fill the ranks. So they had to undo that again. But they were also paying, I mean, I have no idea what the salaries now. But when I worked in New York, it was 23,500, and you had to live within the five boroughs. Like, who could afford to live in the city now? So it's this self-perpetuating cycle where if you want to give discretion to people,

you need to be able to weed out the bad apples, which means you have to have higher standards. You have to pay people more so more people want the job. I got it. I mean, these are complex solutions. Complex issues, I don't have an answer to. But I think it's worth asking the questions. Yeah, totally. Kind of in that same realm, we talked about Big Man is kind of his, he is Preble's nemesis.

So he is who he's going up against. But he's also, I'm assuming you also weren't necessarily writing him as a villain either, because from his perspective, like, he is trying to protect humanity as a whole. So were you trying to keep him kind of, he's even in a little bit of a gray area too? Yeah. He's, I guess he would be the least gray, but still, he's a gray area. Yeah. Because he, his job is to protect the country.

And later, he thinks he's protecting humanity. but he's also his methods are are definitely you know wrong if there's a right and wrong

and but one thing I was really wanted to be careful of with Big Men is I've always disliked books that where the good guy wins because the bad guy does something stupid you know like the James

stereotypical James Bond villain who talks so long that James Bond finds an escape because the villain talked too long. And that's always irritated me. I wanted to make a villain that was as compelling and as intelligent as possible so that you create a sense of dread for the main character because you know that,

you know Big Man's not going to screw up. By the end of the book, you understand why he's taking some of the decisions he's taking. But I didn't, I didn't, want to let, I didn't want to make it easy on Preble at any point by letting big man be a, a weak villain or a dumb villain or, or making mistakes. Again, because I, whether it's an argument or a book, I like, I like stealing, you know, versus the difference between a strong man and a steel man, um, argument. I want to do an, in the sense of characters, too.

I, I didn't want to give, you know, an easy out to anyone. Um, And so big men, I think the thing that makes big man interesting is that he is so intelligent. And, but he's also, you know, quite evil on his methods. But I think that, again, with, yeah, that reflects to some extent, you know, I think there is a political dimension. There are people in power who do really think they know better than everybody else. and that they're, I don't think anybody sees themselves as a bad guy in their own eyes. Right. I mean, you can go all the way to Hitler, and I don't think Hitler ever saw himself as a bad guy in his own eyes.

And so I think it's important to make your villains, people who at least have some sort of as sick as the morality. I mean, not the saying that big men is as sick of Hitler, but no matter how wrong or, twisted somebody's morality might be within their own head, it's going to have a rational structure and explanation. Yeah. And so I want to make sure that big man had that kind of internal moral structure. And then and that had elements that even the reader could agree with. Yeah.

Yeah. He all, because he also was like so convinced that Preble really was a threat, an international threat, not just national. Just because he had different, well, I mean, it's like the ability to see a little bit of the future. But like just because he had a little bit of an edge on everyone, he just assumed that meant that he was inherently dangerous, which is also like, you kind of understand it from his perspective, but you're also like, we all kind of have different, uh, like

strengths over other people too. So it's kind of like, is he really that dangerous? But he had totally decided that he was. Well, I think I think part of that was because in, in that sense, big man was a person personification of, of the system. And I think the system, yeah, system is kind of mindless in that if, if somebody's out, if it can't, uh, pull somebody into its own structure like the that that was the idea that you know if just like ants that's why i like the parallel of the ant colony that more is different and so if if a lot of ants go to a particular location the other ants don't think about why they're going to that location they just there's a higher level of pheromones that's why sometimes you end up i don't

if they're seen at these circles where ants get into this loop and they will basically walk in those circles until they exhaust themselves because the more ants will walk in that circle, the more pheromones they drop and then more ants come and they just get stuck walking the circle until they all die of exhaustion. I think to some extent our our political system and our works in a similar way. And because treble was it was impossible to bring preble into the structures of of the system, it just kept adding more and more resources to try to pull them in and they couldn't. So it created almost the version of the that was spiraling ants where it just spiral out of control. And so big man was meant to be, you know, it's hard to draw,

have a character that's the system. So big man, and that's why his name is big man, he was meant to be a personification of the system as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. It totally felt that way. And you could just feel the way he was making decisions were so motivated by the system that he was in as well. And it did. just keep, keep escalating, as we mentioned earlier, since he had the power of all the systems, like, behind him, basically. So it still was an unfair fight for the most part, but he definitely was obsessed with getting to Preble. But yeah, I really loved it. I thought it was so much fun. It had me thinking about all kinds of things. I mentioned to you, if anyone has seen Civil War,

from A24, really similar feeling where you don't really know what good or bad is the whole time that you're reading it. Well, watching in the case of the movie, but that makes it an even more exciting reading experience. So I just, I really enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And I really appreciate what you were doing for books generally and me in my book specifically. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Where should people follow you to stay up to date with everything you're writing? Well, my website is just my last name, boldizard.com. So that's easy. And then I'm on Twitter at Ed Boldezer. It's nice having a different last name I can get URLs on the handles. On Instagram is at Alexander Boldezar.

and the book is available pretty much everywhere both in audiobook and ebook and paperback yeah if possible i always prefer people to buy it from a local bookshop but i'll be happy with you know i'm happy with anybody reading it even if you download it for free but but yeah if possible support your local bookshop yeah totally well i will put those links in a show for everyone and thanks so much for coming on and talking about you again