Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a fresh, character-driven post-apocalyptic survival story. It almost reads like a zombie survival story without the zombies!
Published 2014; won the Arthur C. Clarke award
Brent: 3 stars. Extremely well written and occasionally gripping in the post-apocalypse timeline, but spent a little too much time on people-magazine style coverage of a movie star’s life for my taste.
Cody: 4 stars. In the world of popular post-apocalyptic lit., crushingly depressing or totally ridiculous prepper porn stories are the norm, but Station Eleven’s balance of realism and optimism for humanity are refreshing and novel.
Here's the setup:
Station Eleven is told through the eyes of many characters. It starts with a devastating flu pandemic that tears across the world and destroys civilization, and then jumps back and forth across time, with each chapter following a single character either before or after the pandemic.
Half the time we’re in the post-pandemic, post-civilized world with the members of The Traveling Symphony as they move across the Midwest performing Shakespeare plays and playing concerts in tiny towns. The other half of the time, we’re in the world before the flu, getting to know Arthur Leander, a famous movie star and the people who surround him in the years running up to the pandemic.
How are all these disparate threads connected? And what exactly is happening with the mysterious Prophet and his followers in the formerly safe town of St Deborah by the Water?
Hugonauts' Thoughts:
Station Eleven feels like a zombie survival story without the zombies. The survivors search through abandoned buildings for supplies, they all carry weapons and know how to use them; and meeting a stranger is at best stressful, at worst potentially deadly. It delivers on the core, and most appealing, tenant of post-apocalyptic literature; man wouldn’t it be nice if life were simpler again? That fantasy is, we believe, what is so intrinsically satisfying about the subgenre, but St. John Mandel finds this feeling without the gratuitous violence that typically lives in post-apocalyptia. She instead illustrates and focuses on humanity’s relentless ability to seek more than just survival, even in adverse circumstances.
The pre-flu timeline of the novel also explores the hollowness of celebrity and the way we worship it, and the drudgery of every-day modern life we attach ourselves to. This serves as an interesting counterpoint to the post-flu timeline, as it addresses the reasons that readers are drawn to post-apocalyptic fiction in the first place - for a bit of meta commentary on the genre. It also explores the danger of religious fervor and fatalism.
When the book came out in 2014 it was initially categorized as sci-fi. It did quite well, got a lot of readers / buyers, and won the Arthur C. Clarke award. However the author, Emily St. John Mandel, was quite public about the fact that she didn't want it to be in the sci-fi section - she thinks of her books as literary fiction rather than speculative fiction. That attitude unfortunately seems all too common among high-brow readers who look down on SFF and other genre fiction.
We don't understand that elitism. Lots of classic literature has tons of speculative elements! Dracula and Frankenstein are in the literary canon but also literally invented entire genres of speculative fiction. 1984 is clearly a dystopian sci-fi story. Everything by Kafka is in some sort of grim parallel universe where DMV employees rule the world. Even most of Shakespeare's plays are chock full of magic as the driving force behind many of the most important plot points. We would challenge any literary fiction reader to pick up Ursula K. Le Guin and find something to complain about.
Try out Station Eleven if you want something with excellent prose that feels a little different.
PS The HBO mini-series based on the novel (2021) is a wonderful adaptation and very enjoyable!
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Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel
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The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The bleakest and most visceral post-apocalyptic novel ever to be written. It will crush you with its realism. In a really good way, of course.
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