I Wrote a Novel About a European Blackout Before It Actually Happened

On 28 April 2025, I was at home when everything went dark. The computer, the lights, the fridge. The sudden silence of a house without electricity is unlike anything else: it is not the silence of night, it is the silence of machines that stop running. A silence with weight.

My first reaction was technical. Fuses, the breaker box, the neighbours. The usual. But when I stepped outside and saw that not a single traffic light was working in Alcantarilla, when my phone started losing signal and the car radio confirmed that the entire Iberian Peninsula was without power, something inside me froze.

Because I had spent months living through exactly that scenario. Not in real life, but on the pages of a novel I was about to publish.

The Novel That Should Never Have Got It Right

Blackout Europa was published in June 2025. It tells the story of a cyberattack called Medusa that cuts off Spain’s electricity as a dress rehearsal for a continental blackout. Elena Vega, an engineer at Red Eléctrica, has 48 hours to crack the attack before Europe plunges into darkness.

I started writing it in 2024. Not out of supernatural intuition, but for something far more mundane: I have worked in technology for over twenty years, and I had read reports by the Austrian Army on the vulnerability of Europe’s power grids. The Austrian army —not some conspiracy blogger, but a NATO army— had spent years warning that a continental blackout was a matter of "when", not "if".

So I did what those of us who write speculative fiction do: I took a real warning, gave it characters, conflict and a 48-hour deadline, and let the plot do the rest.

The Day Fiction and Reality Crossed Paths

The real blackout was not a cyberattack. Investigations point to failures in the management of the power grid, to fluctuations in renewable output, to a cascade of disconnections that nobody foresaw in time. The causes were technical, not criminal.

But the experience was identical to what I had imagined while writing the novel. The initial disorientation. People staring at their phones as if they might say something useful, when a phone with no network is just a paperweight with a touchscreen. Cars stuck at junctions with no traffic lights. The radio as the only means of communication still working. The feeling —irrational but powerful— that it might never end.

What I had not imagined was the speed at which normality erodes. In my novel, chaos takes chapters to set in. In reality, minutes were enough. People do not need days without power to get nervous; they just need their Wi-Fi cut off for thirty seconds.

What the Fiction Got Right (and What It Didn’t)

It got the fragility right. Europe’s power grid is an extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily fragile system. It works because thousands of people do their jobs well every second of every day. All it takes is for something to fail at the wrong moment for the whole thing to come crashing down.

It got the dependence right. We do not know how to live without electricity. We cannot find our way without Google Maps, pay without a card, or communicate without WhatsApp. What was an inconvenience in 1990 is an emergency in 2025.

It got the duration wrong. In the novel, the blackout lasts for days and the situation deteriorates steadily. The real blackout lasted hours. They were enough hours to cause chaos, but not enough for the extreme scenario of the fiction. Fortunately.

It got the cause wrong. Medusa is a sophisticated cyberattack. The real blackout was a systemic failure. But that, paradoxically, is more frightening: you don’t need a villain for the lights to go out. The system can collapse all on its own.

Am I a Prophet? No. I’m a Computer Scientist.

When the first readers started sending me messages along the lines of "how did you know?", the answer was always the same: I didn’t know. I had read it. The reports on the vulnerability of Europe’s power grids are out there, public, for anyone who cares to read them. Experts have been warning about it for years. The problem is that experts publish three-hundred-page PDFs while people read twenty-word headlines.

What I did was translate those reports into a format people actually consume: a story with characters, tension and a clock ticking down. Speculative fiction doesn’t predict the future; it makes it readable.

As a computer scientist, I have spent my whole life working with systems. And the main lesson of working with systems is that they all fail. The question is not "will it fail?", but "what happens when it does?". That question, applied to the power grid of an entire continent, is the starting point of Blackout Europa.

A Year Later

Almost a year after the real blackout, the novel keeps finding readers who come to it because of the connection with what they lived through on that 28 April. One of the most frequent comments in the Amazon reviews is how "unsettlingly real" the read feels. Not because I am especially visionary, but because reality was already there before I turned it into a novel.

In the meantime, I keep writing. My second novel, PIZZA, TWITTER y 23 días en el INFIERNO, has nothing to do with blackouts: it is the story of a forty-something programmer stranded in the Namib Desert because of a tweet. Dark humour, analogue survival, zero technology.

I hope that this time reality won’t prove me right.