We Could Have Been “Station Eleven”
A Beautiful Horror of a Gone World
“It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
Book: Station Eleven. Date of publication: 2014. Genre: Sci-fi
Station Eleven left me hollow.
I had originally decided to quit writing books reviews, but this one made me feel some complicated emotions and I felt an urgency to write about it.
I am halfway through the story and somehow it feels like I am surrounded by vastness. This is the allure of an empty world where civilization has quite elegantly collapsed; humanity is left stranded on its remains.
In Station Eleven, it is not a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion that brings the end of the world, the world here dies of a disease.
The Georgia flu appeared with a familiar chaos with 99% mortality rate and the global death toll rose at such a fast pace that humanity failed to counter it. The story is atmospheric, has beautiful worldbuilding and it elegantly portrays the fragility of our civilization; how little it would take to destroy everything.
One can imagine an entire city as a big machine, unable to run without enough people to run it. Not enough people to run the power plant means no electricity for the town, no electricity means no television, no news casting, no water supplies. Not enough people to transport food means the so-called food centers, aka the supermarkets stay ransacked, empty. No fertilized land, nobody knows how to farm or hunt or kill. The concept of toilet paper, cars, airplanes, ships, air-conditioned, beds, they all become remnants of a vague distant past, historical science fiction. Add extreme weather to that equation and humanity has lost this war.
The story brings this destruction to life by painting it from different angles, shadowing the lives various characters living in pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse timeline. To not spoil too much, I would simply mention the protagonist of this story: Khristen, an actress walking the shores of America with The Travelling Symphony, a group of people who perform Shakespearean plays and music orchestra in different tiny settlement. In the ruined world like this, art is only hope, one of few goof things these settlements look forward to.
What got me spooked was not the story itself, but its resemblance to the real-life pandemic we have all suffered in 2020. The Georgia flu has exact symptoms as covid 19 and is slightly more lethal, while for covid death happened within 14 days, this virus kills within 4.
This increased ferocity of this fictional virus is what made it unmanageable in the fictional world, leading to the setting of the new decaying world of station eleven. It is scary how close we were to become this. Reading this novel was like observing a grave possibility that we have somehow escaped. It shows what covid 19 potentially could have achieved, had it been slightly stronger. I wonder, the next time when we face a pandemic, will we be prepared enough?
Like always,
thank you for reading.
