I thought for this post I would revisit a science-fiction book I read about half a year ago, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It came back into my mind when I saw a tweet from the author on my twitter timeline (https://twitter.com/EmilyMandel/status/1237807751620853762?s=20). She was retweeting somebody who had said “Guys have you read Station Eleven? Read Station Eleven. @EmilyMandel,” and replied by saying “Counterpoint: maybe wait a few months?” Besides the initial irony of an author telling people not to read her book, I was immediately struck with an eerie sense of how similar the story was to what we’re experiencing now with the COVID-19 pandemic. I was actually shocked I hadn’t made the connection sooner, considering I really enjoyed the book and read it so recently. I guess I had it slotted into the “fiction” category of my mind, and thus didn’t think about it in relation to our reality.

The book is about the rapid spread of a novel flu virus that originates in Georgia (the country), and quickly becomes a pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population. While the speed and deadliness of this fictional virus are (luckily) much different from our reality, there are a few ideas she presents that evoke our current situation. The first is the general sense of a new normal, and the impossibility of return to a time that seemed so stable. The second is the idea of isolation and quarantine – the reader spends the early chapters witnessing the spread of the flu through the eyes of a man who locked himself in his brother’s apartment for months, watching the world fall apart around him. The third is the idea of optimism through art in our changed world – much of the novel is spent with a traveling troupe of actors working to ring Shakespeare back to the apocalyptic U.S. While each one of these is way more dramatic than our current situation, I think there’s still something to take away – hope. There is an theme of hope running through the entire novel, and it ends with a moment looking towards a hopeful future. After revisiting the ok, I’m trying to take that hope away in a time when its easy to feel like things won’t be better for a long time.

Also, I guess I’m not the only one turning to this story again: EW revisited it for their “Quarantine Book Club” (https://ew.com/books/quarantine-book-club-station-eleven-helped-my-reading-slump/). Still, it’s a bit of a tricky one for me to recommend to others at this time – if you can’t handle images of our worst-case scenario (even with hopeful themes!), you should probably heed the author’s advice and not read it right now.