California in State of Emergency Over Power, Hundreds of thousands of people in a swath from the Oregon border to Bakersfield had their power cut temporarily in rolling blackouts; frantic efforts to buy power from the Northwest grid were unsuccessful as other utility companies refused to sell, citing the near-bankruptcy of California’s two largest utility companies. Traffic lights and ATM machines stopped functioning.

When I read Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren — which someone has neatly described as the first novel of “ambiguous heterotopia” — several decades ago, it burned itself into my consciousness as an archetype — chaotic life in the ruins of the metropolis after some vague, unnamed apocalypse. Nothing as specific as those (often clumsy) novels explicitly posing the aftermath of nuclear war, which was the only apocalyptic referent I had in those days, so it never seemed possible we’d actually live it during my lifetime. But if I were living in California right now, I might think I was on the doorstep… “…not with a bang but a whimper”?