roger that...I think it’s a minor quibble about the 3 hour advance notice. Clearly, that’s a writer’s device. For narrative reasons, it works better with a 3 hour warning. For the same type of reason, I created a fictional stadium sniper/stampede massacre to jump the story along in overdrive. And I will also invent towns and move counties across rivers to better a plot.
I have long believed it’s the punch you don’t see coming that will knock you out. Who knows what the immediate precipitator of grid-down will be? It could be a mega tsunami, nuclear war, pandemic, financial panic etc. The exact plot device used to make the grid collapse doesn’t matter.
We can all agee that if the grid goes down hard, it won’t matter much what caused it. Shoot, it would be good NOT to have to worry about lingering radiation effects or pandemic disease at the same time that you are dealing with no electricity for the foreseeable future.
But no matter what the direct cause, we can all agree, “Lights Out” will peg the suck-o-meter.
roger that...Just a thought here - what about a solar event that is known to precede a massive gamma ray burst by about three hours?
Say that in the past a similar event was witnessed by a research satellite and the star it was studying got suddenly brighter and noisier on the electromagnetic spectrum by a certain amount in a certain period of time, then three hours later the satellite picks up this huge increase in gamma rays just before it gets fried...
Then cue the scientists back on earth observing the data from that research satellite saying "Gee, lucky for us that gamma ray burst wasn't aimed at earth..."