Hollywood wunderkind J.J. Abrams’ television drama “Revolution” imagined Earth after electricity, without explanation, abruptly died. Reading Quentin Meillassoux’s Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, one wonders whether Abrams was familiar with the obscure French fiction that buttresses the book’s thesis, Rene Barjavel’s 1943 science-fiction novel Ravage. In it, “electricity stops existing overnight… yet remarkably, Barjavel does not really attempt to explain the phenomenon; he merely describes its cataclysmic consequences.”

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