Fiction. SAFE MODE is Sam Riviere's first book-length prose text. Framed as an 'ambient novel', a term coined by the American writer Tan Lin, SAFE MODE abandons the traditional novel's temporal logic in favour of spatial and atmospheric dispersal, combining intensely personal material with unacknowledged appropriated content to explore the narratives made possible by mood, or the moods made possible by narrative. Which is which? Does it even matter?.