Outage: A Journey into Electric City

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

The information explosion has its victims, Powe says in his new book,
and nerve endings in Outage are frayed to the breaking point.
“Technology can unbalance us,” says Bruce, the narrator. “We can
become lopsided, specialized, out of whack.” Addictions are
inescapable. Computers were the chief cause of the stock-market crash of
1987, “the first global outage. It was computers ... that had run
things on Black and Blue Mon-day. The rampaging machines were asserting
control.”

Bruce is a university teacher in Toronto. There are hints of discord in
his marriage. It is too bad that what begins as a powerful statement of
the risks of hyper-reality evolves into a rather self-indulgent,
undeveloped hodgepodge of undeveloped characters and situations. Whether
the scene is the electric city of Toronto or the waterscapes of Venice,
when one writes about a discontinuous world of stimuli, one needs to
superimpose form on the prose. Powe does better when he keeps his thesis
steady.