Station Eleven, By Emily St. John Mandel, a Standalone ILB Thread

Well this was a cosy catastrophe, being a John Wyndham fan I was fine with that. I wonder if this was a lighthearted reference to Cormac McCarthy's less cosy catastrophe:

...her brother had been plagued by nightmares. "The road", he'd always said, when the shook him awake and asked him what he'd been dreaming of."

On reflection though it does seem a little more lightweight than when I was in the midst of it. I'm not sure if having all the protagonists connected to one another added anything, except making me think that the prophet had a point, they had all been saved for a (Man in the High Castle-esque) reason. And the two included images from the graphic novel were disappointingly rubbish, nothing like the Moebius-esque ones I'd imagined.

tv show just dropped; might be a little too real right now tbh

thought the little girl actress was fantastic

Realized the other day that this book manages to include not just a pandemic but also a shipping crisis: Miranda on that beach in Malaysia looking at all the container ships that are stuck offshore unable to dock.

I was disappointed by this novel. It came with some kind of big repute, yet felt like ... like ... what I imagine Young Adult fiction to be like? The immediate rejoinder is that this is a baseless slur against YA fiction. But it seems a shorthand way to describe the bright, 2-dimensional character of the book.

In any case, I was surprised that the novel was so slight. The different aspects didn't add up well, the connexions didn't feel worthwhile. The very short chapters that came along at one point didn't fit in.

Yet, to be sure, she was right about the emergence of zoonotic pandemics.

I liked it. I thought it was a little bit slick, a little bit pat, yet also quite lovely in the way it managed to summon up a sense of nostalgia for the world we live in - or the world we lived in at the time the book came out. And a few things really stayed with me: Miranda dying on the beach in Malaysia, with the sun coming up and the container ships just in her field of vision, is an extraordinarily beautiful scene imo.

I reread it some way into lockdown, and it seemed to me then that the Station Eleven comic, with the people of the Undersea, was the really prescient part of it. The story about people who are dangerous because they resist reality, because they want to go back to a world that doesn't exist anymore - that felt much more like our pandemic than any of the details about the Georgia Flu.

Those are good comments -- about 'nostalgia for the world we live in - or the world we lived in at the time the book came out': yes: it makes ordinary modern reality seem like something fond and lost.

(Perhaps John Wyndham et al did that too?)

The comic within the novel, I felt, might have been central and important (as in, say, KAVALIER AND CLAY), but actually went nowhere. The version I bought and read contained no images, as I think others' did. I no longer remember any of the details of the comic as ekphrastically described.

I don't think any editions had illustrations, did they?

mine has two pages right at the very back, a mocked up cover and a splash page so effectively just 2 pictures with about 2 sentences of text.

this show is good

HBOMAX?

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2021 season is nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

It's a TV programme?

Yes, it was turned into an excellent 10-part series.

I remember damage.