If civilization ended tomorrow - like literally ended, no more internet or electricity or iPhones or food machines or capitalism - I would not survive. I knew this before reading Station Eleven; I knew it before The Road, before I Am Legend, before The Passage, before The Stand (still on my TBR after attempting to read and having such bad nightmares I let it go for the time being). I am not a survivor and I accept this.
Survival in post-apocalyptic novels is predicated on three things - survival skills, a will to live, and luck. I have no survival skills. I cannot farm or build shelters or perform basic surgery. I can sew, but not on people.
My will to live is also tenuous. In the case I wake up 24 hours later in a hospital alone in a silent destroyed city, I will most definitely end it for myself. Mostly because I am truly blind without modern technology and also I hate being dirty. Bad combo for the end of the world.
[The third thing - Luck - is a moot point if you don’t have the first two. Which I don’t. Luck in my case is a swift painless ending.]
However, that doesn’t stop me from READING about the end of the world. These post-apocalyptic novels might be grouped under the larger sci-fi category Speculative Epic which includes all kinds of different world-ending changes - some that disrupt everything (technology & basic systems), or just some things (government & society). In Station Eleven, everything has failed and we must start fresh like Baby Groot in a pot - naked and dirty.
The End of the World May Look Like *Just* Another Day
Station Eleven is a Perfect Book. 10/10 no notes. Every sentence. Every chapter ending. Every character insight. It made me weepy and dream of buying a bookstore dedicated to books like this.
Written before our lifetime pandemic, this haunting story is only more important after what COVID put us through. It’s a multiple-POV, decade-spanning sweeping epic that also feels intimately personal. It’s about a world-ending, 99% death rate flu that wipes out six continents in only a few days. The only people left are either immune or just lucky. One day civilization is thriving, and the next complete chaos. We get the before, the during, and the after fragmented into a compelling narrative that shows how everyone and everything is connected.
Institutions *Cannot* Save You
The survivors of Station Eleven have a before and an after - who they were in the year of our lord and who they were Year 1 and beyond. Characters hold on for civilization’s institutions to “save” them because they cannot fathom the complete collapse -
At first the people in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded… At first it seems inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with blankets and boxes of food, that ground crews would return shortly thereafter… Year four was when Clark realized this was the way the years would continue to be marked from now on, counted off one by one from the moment of disaster.
In so many post-apocalyptic stories, government is quickly empowered to control the situation, often ruthlessly (The Last of Us), or is the cause of collapse and attempted cover-up (The Passage), or is recreated by the survivors (The Stand). Station Eleven is about that liminal period between collapse and resurrection, where humanity becomes tribal and must reorganize themselves or suffer. It is quite beautiful to think of a moment in time when your whole world was only the people you could actually see and hear on a daily basis.
The *Things* They Carried
In the new world, consumer products - once the lifeblood of capitalism - are now either practically-worthless artifacts or repurposed for survival. Objects like iPhones, computers, and motorized bikes are placed in a museum, while fresh food, shelter, and soap are invaluable. Everything else that can be repurposed, is: sheets into tents, trucks into wagons, barrels into stoves. These items are literally and figuratively carried into the new world, but once there, are either reclaimed with new use (pragmatic or artifact) or left to be reclaimed and destroyed by the earth (crumbling buildings, rotting cars, all of civilization).
[My favorite image was of the man who at day three offered his credit card to pay for the Mexican food all the airport residents stole - that card left untouched by the register for weeks until Clark commandeered it for the museum.]
Objects also serve as links to the past world, reminders of what was possible, and hope that humanity may fight its way back into a world with electricity (when you opened the fridge door and light just “came out”). Objects people carry symbolize their hope - a comic book about space, a Bible, a costume. When your life consists of what you carried or found, each object must be meaningful.
The Devil is in the *Details*
Fiction often grapples with the balance of neatly resolved narrative and the unknowableness of reality. In a story, the author has the power to give you information characters wouldn’t ever know in “real’ life - thoughts in a person’s mind before they die, why something mysterious occurred, what happens in the “end”.
The beauty of Station Eleven is that the only things we [the reader] know more than the characters are the details. We don’t find out what happened to Clark’s boyfriend or the pilot who took off alone or the tarmacked plane that was never opened upon arrival - we too must live with that incredible uncertainty. Instead, we see the fate of Miranda’s comic; the identity of the paramedic who assisted Arthur; the origin story of the Prophet. All things that are actually knowable in this primitive society where travel is by foot and communication by mouth.
Mandel’s characterization is also powered by the details. Every day many small actors come in and out of our lives - people on the road, at the store, delivering packages, serving us coffee - and our luxury is moving about our day unnoticed. In Station Eleven, we can’t possibly know all there is to know about the small actors, even if they have a great impact on the future. We are, however, connected by inherent human traits recognizable in our world or the next -
Jeevan had been prone to cinematic daydreams lately, images tumbling together and overlapping, and his favorite movie involved waking in the morning to the sound of a loudspeaker, the army coming in and announcing that it was all over, this whole flu thing cleared up and taken care of, everything back to normal again. He’d push the dresser away from the door and go down to the parking lot, maybe a soldier would offer him a cup of coffee, clap him on the back. He imagined people congratulating him on his foresight in stocking up on food.
How many times have you thought of your life in cinematic terms? This small paragraph tells us so much about what kind of person Jeevan is - just like most of us would, he can only relate the monstrosity of what has occurred to film, to narrative, and with distance, as he has no other reference for this magnitude of tragedy.
Because Survival is *Insufficient*
Written on the side of the Traveling Symphony tent, survival is at once all there is and also meaningless. Banded together in new tribes of location and circumstance, all they have is each other and the hope for something more -
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty… All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such… but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
One of the most perfect books I have ever read, I will be thinking about Station Eleven for a long time - once my heart has recovered I’ll be picking up the sequel Sea of Tranquility, which will certainly extend that obsession into infinity.
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Leave a comment with your favorite apocalypse book, movie, or tv show.
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See you around the bookshelf!
Natalie