4 ideas
Lin Qunhao, an engineer at Taiwan's Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (Lungmen), is found with his memory gone after a meltdown forces the evacuation of northern Taiwan, including Taipei. The novel alternates between the aftermath and the days leading up to the accident, as fragments of his memory return. Those fragments show that he saw warning signs and internal cover-ups before the disaster.
When a plant is built from components by different vendors, with repeated design changes and political deadlines forcing completion, no single party understands how the integrated system behaves. Safety failures then come from interactions no one owns, not from one broken part. Pressure to show the project works also drives staff to suppress known defects instead of fixing them.
After a disaster, public attention shifts from preventing it to deciding who benefits from explaining it. In the election that follows the meltdown, parties treat control of the story, meaning who knew what and who is to blame, as the prize. What the public learns about the disaster is filtered by which narrative helps someone win.
The engineer's lost memory stands in for a society that has already forgotten or ignored the warnings about the plant. Because the reader reconstructs the cause backward from the ruin, the book shows how disasters come from knowledge that existed but was not acted on. Recovering the memory is framed as a moral act of accountability, not just a plot device.