Yesterday, as everybody in Australia knows, one of our major phone networks had an outage that lasted fourteen hours. It wasn't just a wry inconvenience, as suggested by the report that one woman was alerted to the outage by her cat because her wifi connected automatic feeder hadn't worked. People were seriously affected in countless ways from being unable to pay for things or get money from a bank, to being completely stranded because the trains weren't running, and their phones weren't working to call a taxi. Hospitals and emergency services were affected, and emergency calls to triple zero ("000") didn't work from Optus landlines.

There was a lot of human kindness around yesterday as those not affected helped out.

Meanwhile, I just happened to be reading Louis de Bernières' new novel Light over Liskeard...

The blurb sounds daft, and I was enjoying the book as light entertainment... until yesterday. Our politicians are in overdrive: the Opposition *yawn* says it's the government's fault, the government is demanding better 'resilience' provision from the phone company and the media says It Must Do Better. But the thing is, as de Bernières novel so perfectly shows in his novel which doesn't seem so speculative anymore, when everything is so interconnected, there are human constraints on preventing mass chaos. It's a futuristic novel that pokes fun at much of modern life because it's set in a very recognisable future.

(Just thinking about yesterday and those people who use wifi to open the gates to their Smart House where they rely on consumer technology such as smartphones, wearables, screens and sound products do everything from opening the windows to ordering the butter when the fridge says so.)

De Bernières has fun with a couple in a restaurant that's cheap because there are no staff, but they can't complain when the food doesn't come because they don't have a password that was generated when they made the booking. He has even more fun when the same couple break up because he's been making use of sexbots behind her back. When she vents to her husband down in Cornwall, he tells her about the Frenchman and the Australian woman.

'... there's a Frenchman in Lyons and an Australian woman in Melbourne and they're married. Deeply in love, of course. But neither of them wants to move countries, so what they do is they have long, intimate chats onscreen, and then in their bedrooms they've each got a sexbot that's the exact replica of the other, and that way they get sex with each other exactly when they want it, without inconveniencing one another in any way at all. Without even having to meet.' (p.195)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/09/light-over-liskeard-2023-by-louis-de-bernier... ( )