The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 June 2025
by Marc Elsberg
As we all know, we have become entirely dependent on our electronic devices. As more and more of them become futher and further interconnected (while playing fast and furious with our private personal information), even through this vague thing called the Internet of Things, it also becomes painfully clear just how painful it will be if/when the system is shattered in one way or another. Indeed, the whole thing relies upon a steady power source, to run the coffee makers and charge all our batteries. The electric power grid, some parts of it more than a century old, is vulnerable to plain old decay (sometimes triggering massive wildfires). But it is also as vulnerable to electronic sabotage as all of our private information held by doctors, employers and all those apps we've got crowding our phones. This is the point of this brutally terse novel by Austrian author, Marc Elsberg (first published in 2022).
The book opens as the power dies. Its brief fast-moving chapters jump from one character to another across Europe as they variously experience the outage, and some, including our primary protagonist, Piero Manzano, try to discern the cause and solve the unfolding disaster. Day after day, conditions worsen. Food rots in freezers, animals die by the millions on farms, nuclear power plants go into emergency as cooling systems dependent on the grid grind to a halt. Thousands, then maybe millions, of people's lives are threatened. Along the way, we get a glimpse into the control center of the saboteurs who are determined that a catastrophic loss of power in Western society will ultimately result in the collapse of the corrupt capitalist regime and bring a greater equality to the world's citizens. How exactly that is to come about is not at all revealed. Indeed, in Elsberg's formulation, it goes the other way, as the disaster brings about authoritarian rule in some places.
Two weeks pass. Consider that there's a popular quote going around that the world is always just four meals away from revolution. How will desperate people act? Will they blame the disaster on their capitalist overlords, or will they instead take direction to blame only the disaffected and over-educated revolutionaries? Elsberg raises these questions and leaves hints along the way as to how he feels about it. It is an engrossing and disturbing story, as the disaster that it presents is entirely too plausible and sometimes it feels like it is always just around the corner.
Now, this reader is well aware that if you're writing a thriller, you can keep the tension high if you avoid telling the reader if there are other characters who are riding out the thriller's adventure just fine. Throughout this gripping novel, there is no mention at all of solar or wind power generation. Of course, if these are wired into the grid, and it's your grid that is taken down, then you take down wind and solar along with it. But if you had the fantasy world of distributed autonomous solar and wind power, then you'd have to show the occasional character who has solar panels on his roof, sitting peacefully in his house with refrigerated food, and maybe watching a little television.
In the USA, at any rate, fossil fuel energy providers have been vigorously fighting the very notion that people could sport solar panels and simply ride quietly off the grid. Across the USA, there are laws written by these companies requiring private residences to remain attached to the grid, despite their private power generation. In some places, people with solar panels are required to sell their power to the power companies and then purchase their own power off the grid again. This is like forcing victims to live with their abusers. We're cementing in the profits of private and antiquated energy systems. We're surrendering our autonomy to the profits of the fossil fuel companies by allowing such laws and restrictions to become the norm. In some places, you can't even purchase solar panels that permit you to disconnect from the grid and live on your own power.
Which brings us back to the "terrorists" of this book's tale. They look at this corporate dominance over personal autonomy as the very thing they want to dismantle by their attacks, and this reader, while abhoring the methods, can entirely see where they're coming from.