"Blackout" is about a widespread power failure in Europe. He himself has supplies for ten days and is "oversupplied with crankable radios and lamps," says author Marc Elsberg in "So techt Deutschland" - and also which technologies are particularly exciting for him in the future.
What if one day aliens landed on earth? In science fiction novels, this is already a standard story. Marc Elsberg would then describe his works more as "what if novels". What if the power went out and "I suddenly can't go to the toilet anymore" or "What if you could use social media to influence elections?" Elsberg gives two examples from his works.
He described the former in his best-selling novel Blackout. Published almost ten years ago, he hits the mark with this novel today. He was also ahead of his time with the novel Zero. It is now a bitter reality that social media influence elections and people. In George Orwell's novel 1984, it is a central power that pretends and controls, similar to the Chinese social credit system.
In Zero, however, he describes that our capitalist system doesn't need something like this, "because we're stupid enough to do it voluntarily for small rewards, to move in such a system," Elsberg describes his view. But he also sees that something has changed and refers to the GDPR in the European Union, which "is slowly becoming the standard in the western world," argues the Vienna-born writer.
However, Elsberg is not only concerned with technologies, but also with new ideas of how people can live together. "In this way, knowledge from science, technology and the humanities can lead to completely new ideas," the author hopes.
