A few weeks ago, I finally watched the HBO/Max series Station Eleven, which is based on the novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. I first read the book ten years ago, just after it was published, and it has quickly become one of my favorite fiction novels.
The story follows an assembly of characters in the wake of a global pandemic that spares only one in every thousand people. Mandel begins the novel in the middle of the virus outbreak; we watch as characters realize with disbelief the scale and ruthless nature of the Georgian flu that besets the world–and soon claims many in the novel’s opening pages.
Then the novel leaps fifteen years into the future. Civilization as we know it has collapsed. There’s no more electricity, no more law or order, no more government–no more nations, anywhere. There are only the scattered survivors who adapted to this new way, mostly by living like those from pre-industrial revolution history.
