Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel
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Station Eleven is SO not your typical dystopian novel! Imagine a virus... you know, the rare viruses that we hear about all the time popping up in Asia? Now imagine that this virus is successful in infecting and killing 99.9% of the population of the earth. What would be left behind? EVERYTHING.... except most of the people. Most end of the world fiction portray a bombed out, shell of a world. But in Station Eleven, everything is still there, but there is no one to keep it running. Television stations eventually just fade away. The last people to die are perhaps in the cars on the freeway. Public places are eerie, abandoned tombs. Finally the lights go out.

Some survive and civilization (if you can call it that) attempts a reboot. But the world is a dangerous place. Whom can you trust? Those who lived in the "before" miss the most mundane things.... cool air blowing through vents in a house.... the magic of electricity.... the wonder of travel. The world is now basically in a "dark ages" survival model. And yet, odd traces of "before" creep into the new reality.

Mandel jumps back and forth from the "before" and the "after" to tell the story of a group of actors. They travel and perform Shakespeare in the post-apocalyptic world. This appears to be the first glimmers of civilization to return. I kept wondering, however.... if they could find and use play scripts, why didn't anyone find an old library and look up how to get the electric grid up and running again?

Station Eleven is the type of reading that keeps you up at night... not in fear, but with your head swimming with "What if...?"

I understand that it might become a movie! But for now, watch the book trailer HERE.