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STATION ELEVEN

by Emily St. John Mandel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2014

Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.

Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.

In her fourth novel, Mandel ( The Lola Quartet , 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear , his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014

LITERARY FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | APOCALYPTIC & POST APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI

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by Emily St. John Mandel

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BOOK TO SCREEN

Station Eleven Miniseries to Star Mackenzie Davis

SEEN & HEARD

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans , 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

LITERARY FICTION

More by Kazuo Ishiguro

by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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In “Station Eleven,” All Art Is Adaptation

“Station Eleven,” Emily St. John Mandel’s hit novel, from 2014, is the kind of book you gulp down in a sitting. I recently reread it in an afternoon; my partner devoured it on two short flights and a layover. The book inspires the sort of voraciousness that it ascribes to its virus, which blazes around the globe in a matter of days, killing ninety-nine per cent of the people in its path. The story’s main action takes place twenty years later, in the “After,” where a fierce young woman named Kirsten tours with a band of Shakespearean players, encountering agrarian communes and violent cults, keeping the flame of art alive. That time line has a clear, tight shape—it builds to a climactic confrontation and the resolution of a mystery—but Mandel splices it with flashbacks to the “Before,” our familiar, dazzling chaos of electricity, cars, and cell phones. There, the seductive figure of Arthur Leander, a playboy actor who dies onstage of a heart attack, bridges far-flung character arcs. We meet his ex-wife Miranda, whose pensive comic book about a stranded astronaut, “Station Eleven,” falls into Kirsten’s hands; Jeevan, an aspiring E.M.T.; and Leander’s second ex-wife, Elizabeth, and son, Tyler.

It’s not always easy to pinpoint what makes a book “unputdownable,” what gives it the feverishly consuming quality that “ Station Eleven ” has. (Although COVID -19 adds fangs to the premise, the novel was wildly popular before the pandemic.) But some of the book’s swiftness derives from its consistency—from a tone that never changes or breaks, slipping through your body like a pure, bright beam. For all their disparate circumstances, Mandel’s characters can evoke variations on a single person: wistful and dreamy, with a competent, vigorous exterior; invested in values such as beauty and goodness; and working to surmount their flaws. The over-all impression is of an author less interested in individuals than in manifesting a minor-key mood coupled with a hopeful, humanist vision.

“ Station Eleven ,” the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Where the book felt stylized, more like poetry or a fable, the series embraces the messiness, range, and complexity of life as real people live it. One doesn’t binge it; ideally one watches its ten episodes slowly, more than once. And it differentiates the novel’s characters, allowing them to summon a wider breadth of experience. On a superficial level, Miranda is now a Black woman with roots in the Caribbean. Arthur was born in Mexico, not British Columbia, and is also more than simply charming; he exudes a sly, almost dangerous sweetness. Jeevan (a soulful Himesh Patel) becomes a freelance culture critic—“I don’t have a job,” he clarifies—who, rather than surge into action during Arthur’s heart attack, can only stand by helplessly. He adopts a girl—an eight-year-old Kirsten—whose parents have disappeared with the onset of the virus, and one of the show’s time lines follows him, the child, and Jeevan’s brother Frank as they hole up in Frank’s apartment tower to wait out the apocalypse.

The show takes one particularly smart liberty with its source material, rethinking art, what it does, and why it matters. Mandel infuses her novel with traditional aestheticism. A wagon in Kirsten’s troupe, the Traveling Symphony, bears a slogan cribbed from “Star Trek”: “Survival is insufficient.” The book’s pandemic survivors are desperate for music, poetry, and performance, and they hunger for scraps of text, even from a brooding comic about space travel. (Onscreen, Jeevan is allowed to wail that the titular cartoon is “so pretentious!”—an opinion that would upend Mandel’s delicately reverent atmosphere.) For post-pandemic audiences, the purest, strongest drugs are Beethoven and the Bard. As one member of the Symphony says, “People want what was best about the world.”

Art may be the world’s premium product, but, for Mandel, it is also not entirely of the world. Its unearthly qualities are represented in part by the spaceman of Miranda’s comic. Here, the novel draws on the old, melancholy notion of art as a beautiful lie. According to the book’s organizing metaphor, “Before” was all theatre, lights, and fantasy; “After” is like waking up, as a planet, from a discombobulating dream. It’s no accident that Arthur’s death ushers in the new order. He is a mascot of pre-pandemic civilization: wealthy, famous, and magnetic, but too entranced by trifles. After the flu hits, humans lose the protection of political institutions, and suffer waves of looting and extremism, but they eventually reconstitute themselves in agrarian coöperatives. They no longer care about impressing one another at dinner parties; they crave “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Symphony forms to recapture glimmers of what was lost. In the book’s careful balance, the old dispensation’s ruin is offset by what these characters have gained—and yet an air of romantic nostalgia, of mourning, prevails.

In short, the book is of a piece with an Arcadian literary tradition that laments the end of paradise but holds up knowledge as a consolation. The adaptation, created by Patrick Somerville, rejects much of this pastoralism. Indeed, Somerville’s attitude toward art seems almost practical by comparison. His texts have a specific purpose: they serve as trapdoors into the subjectivities of the living and the dead. Art matters to the world of this “Station Eleven” not just because it strengthens the social fabric—it’s an experience people can share—but because it notates and preserves the luminously erratic lives that the show itself is at great pains to capture. Miranda’s literary achievement, in her comic, proves secondary to the miraculous way in which it responds to characters’ particular emotions and conflicts. Why do we need art when the world has ended? Because, Somerville answers, it encodes the vivid presence of everyone who’s gone.

A lesser show might make a bolder claim. It might, for instance, reduce Mandel’s aestheticism to grandiose platitudes about how art can save us. But the fact that survival isn’t sufficient does not mean that art is . In both versions of “Station Eleven,” beauty’s power over death is provisional and fleeting; on the show, it’s not even close. While staying in Frank’s aerie in Chicago, the eight-year-old Kirsten directs the brothers in a reënactment of a scene from her comic book. The performance is meant to distract the trio from looming loss; with food supplies dwindling, Jeevan wants to leave the tower, and Frank wants to stay. That they decide to postpone “real life” for art’s sake, for the play, accelerates disaster—an intruder has time to burst in—and yet the scene, in which the comic’s protagonist, Doctor Eleven, bids farewell to his mentor, is also a consecration. Without it, the brothers wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye to one another. Speaking as characters, they become most completely themselves.

Twenty years later, Kirsten’s worn copy of “Station Eleven” has become talismanic to her. Lines from the text reverberate through the show—“I remember damage,” “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.” The cartoon binds Kirsten to a man known only, at first, as the Prophet. Played by Daniel Zovatto, he’s unnervingly soft-voiced and serene, like someone whose pain has alienated him from feeling. He seems to know the words of “Station Eleven” by heart, but his reading of it discards the theme of memory. In fact, he has crafted a youth movement around one particular snippet: “There is no before.”

The book withholds the Prophet’s identity until its last act, contributing to its elegant velocity. Somerville, though, unknots the enigma (spoiler: the Prophet is Tyler, Arthur Leander’s son) almost as soon as the character is introduced. In the novel, Tyler is familiar with “Station Eleven,” the comic written by his father’s former wife, but more enthralled by the Bible, with its doomsday imagery and insistence that everything happens for a reason. A straightforward villain, he incarnates the deceptive uses of fiction, the narcotic power of too-tidy explanations. The show, in turning him into a “Station Eleven” superfan, dims the focus on how art can lead people astray. Now the crucial fact seems to be that two fervent readers, Tyler and Kirsten, are interpreting the same text differently.

The shift is telling. HBO’s “Station Eleven” is obsessed with adaptation, the way that people (many of them actors) reuse and project upon a source. It’s awash in references: Christmas carols, the funk band Parliament, Bob Dylan, “King Lear” and “Hamlet.” There’s also the most transcendent cover of rap music that I’ve ever seen on TV, a set piece that somehow crystallizes a character, a situation, and the human situation, all at once. Most of the art featured on the series doesn’t exist in its original form. It comes filtered through individuals, who carry and change it in time—shaping, recontextualizing, extracting what they need. One feels as though Somerville were triangulating between the texts and his characters to locate some mysterious quality that hovers in the middle. When Kirsten, Jeevan, and Frank stage “Station Eleven,” for example, the play works because the actors and the dynamics among them are so real. Yet the players grow more alive in the performance; their actual dynamics are heightened by it.

In reconsidering what makes art valuable, Somerville does not so much dispute Mandel’s judgments about the past (shining and false) and the future (real and hard) as collapse them. Episodes alternate between the current adventures of the Symphony and the immediate aftermath of the flu, as well as passages from the protagonists’ more distant histories. These melded chronologies seem to insist on the simultaneity of life and memory, just as they evoke the blur of fact and fantasy. Characters’ experiences, like their fictions, become indelible and living parts of them. At one point, Kirsten-as-Hamlet recites a monologue about bereavement while her eight-year-old self is shown discovering that her parents are dead. Later, she hallucinates that she has returned as an adult to Frank’s high-rise, where she watches, again, the ghostly play.

If, in the book, “survival is insufficient” sets up a comparison between life and art, the series suggests—in a limited but real sense—that they’re one and the same. Throughout the show, there’s a thousand-yard P.O.V. shot that intrudes in moments of death or transformation. It’s meant to evoke the perspective of Doctor Eleven, tranquilly observing from space, but it could easily belong to a past or future version of any of the characters, or to a chorus of the flu dead. Early in the novel, after Jeevan tries and fails to revive Arthur, he looks up at the theatre’s “cavernous” emptiness: “fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected.” But, in the adaptation of this moment, the perspective is reversed. Instead of peering through Jeevan’s eyes, the camera stays on him while soaring higher and higher. The human body shrinks as the show’s vantage fuses with that of the departed soul. It’s as if art’s job is to let no one go undetected—to provide the audience that most people, real or imaginary or absent, would be lucky to deserve.

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Thoughts on books, reading, and life, review: station eleven.

Station Eleven , Emily St. John Mandel. New York: Knopf, 2014.

Summary: An account of the end of civilization as we know it after a catastrophic pandemic, and how survivors sought to keep beauty and the memory of what was alive as they struggled against destructive forces to rebuild human society.

Arthur Leander, an accomplished actor who burned through marriages, is on stage in the middle of performing King Lear when his own heart gives out and he dies on stage, despite the effort of a medic in training, Jeevan. Watching is a young child actor, Kirsten Raymonde, who often talked to Arthur. A kind woman takes her aside, noticing an unusual graphic novel of a settlement of survivors on a watery planet, Station Eleven, a gift from Arthur that Kirsten carries for the next twenty years.

That night, as the snow fell on Toronto, was the beginning of the end of civilization. Jeevan’s friend Hua, working at a hospital, calls, urging Jeevan to leave immediately. The hospital is full of flu cases, many but not all from a plane from Russia. Before long, every last one is dead, and all who came in contact are sick, including Hua. None will live. In days, nearly everyone around the world dies. The media goes dead, then the internet, and finally utilities. Planes are grounded. Permanently. Cars run out of gas. Only about one in two hundred and fifty survive.

Emily St. John Mandel, in Station Eleven , imagines a post-pandemic, post-civilization world. Yes, it is a world of predators. Kirsten, a survivor has two knives tattooed on her wrist, the lives taken by her knives. She doesn’t remember her first year, and doesn’t want to. But there are also those who seek to hold on to remnants of beauty. She is part of the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors on a circuit up and down Michigan, performing great music and the works of Shakespeare.

Some towns reconstitute themselves. And some become dangerous. One, St Deborah by the Water, has been taken over by The Prophet and his cult, a Jonestown-type scenario. The Traveling Symphony escapes, along with a child who stows away to escape becoming another of The Prophet’s brides. This sets up a climactic confrontation.

The story goes back and forth tracing the lives of the people connected to Arthur and that night in Toronto, both before and after the pandemic. We meet Clark, a gay actor friend of Arthur’s, one of the survivors living at the Severn City Airport, where flights had been grounded, turning it into its own community. He becomes a curator of The Museum of Civilization, with artifacts from laptops and smartphones to newspapers, all from the time before the pandemic. There was a former wife of Arthur there as well, with their child, Tyler, who has a disturbing habit of quoting apocalyptic passages from the Bible. They eventually leave. Jeevan eventually walks a thousand miles from Toronto to a settlement in what was Virginia.

And there is Miranda Carroll, the artist of Station Eleven . We learn her story, how she met and married author and wrote and drew Station Eleven, giving Arthur two copies shortly before his death…and hers.

Beyond imagining what a world nearly wiped out by a pandemic might be like (a prescient book, written six years before 2020), Mandel explores the powerful longing to cling to the good and the beautiful, and to human community, even when all else falls apart. She reminds us that the complex thing we call civilization is actually a thin veneer, easily stripped away. The question is, what then remains? When the veneer falls away, will there be brutes or beauties?

And what stories will shape us, and how will we read them? There were two copies of Station Eleven. Kirsten had one, and it profoundly shaped her imagination. We learn that the other copy also shaped an imagination, but quite differently. We’re reminded not only of the power of story but also that no two people read a story in the same way.

One final caveat. Don’t do what I did and read the opening chapters of the book the day before returning home on a plane full of people. Those who have read Station Eleven will understand.

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Reviews of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Station Eleven

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• First Published:
• Sep 9, 2014, 352 pages
• Jun 2015, 352 pages

• Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
• Midwest, USA
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Book Summary

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of  King Lear . Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains - this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender,  Station Eleven  tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

Excerpt Station Eleven

Jeevan's understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he'd seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart—was he overreacting?—but there was a certain momentum now, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow but said nothing. "I'm parked just outside," he said. "I'll bring the cart back." The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a long ramp down into a small park-like arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow at the bottom of the ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Now that you've read the entire novel, go back and reread the passage by Czeslaw Milosz that serves as an epigraph. What does it mean? Why did Mandel choose it to introduce Station Eleven?
• Does the novel have a main character? Who would you consider it to be?
• Arthur Leander dies while performing King Lear, and the Traveling Symphony performs Shakespeare's works. On page 57, Mandel writes, "Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape." How do Shakespearean motifs coincide with those of Station Eleven, both the novel and the ...
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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Everyone in the post-collapse world has lost someone; most have lost entire families, friends and lovers. Still, somehow, art persists – stories, drawings, music, and even Shakespearean language. "What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty." Mandel reminds readers to be grateful for all we possess and warns us how fragile this seemingly impervious technology-driven life actually is... continued

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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster ).

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Beyond the Book

A big year for dystopias.

When Emily St. John Mandel was auctioning her novel, Station Eleven , in 2013, she was worried that the world was sick of dystopian fiction. "When I started writing, there were a few literary post-apocalyptic novels, but not quite the incredible glut that there is now…I was afraid the market might be saturated." Luckily for Mandel, the public is still hungry for speculative fiction; her book was sold for a six-figure advance. Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein coined the term "speculative fiction" in a 1947 essay . Broadly understood, it refers to stories that contain futuristic, fantastical, and/or supernatural elements. Some of the seminal works of speculative fiction are George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World...

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Station Eleven by Emily St John, book review: Hope amidst an apocalypse

Mandel’s message is that civilisation – and just as importantly, art – will endure as long as there is life, article bookmarked.

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Post-apocalypse novels are, by their definition, often bleak, downbeat tales, concerned as they generally are with the complete and utter collapse of society as we know it.

Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven follows the traditional route for wiping out much of humanity and re-setting the species’s clock – a particularly virulent strain of influenza, the Georgia Flu, sweeps across the globe leaving those who contract it dead within 48 hours. One survivor estimates that the pandemic has claimed the lives of 99.99 per cent of the global population. Most post-apocalyptic novels deal with the lawless, horrible aftermath of such a crisis, where the dregs of humanity battle it out for food, water and survival, or the far future where our present world is a barely-understood dream of impossible flying machines and boxes across which pictures magically danced.

This is where Mandel deviates from the usual and creates what is possibly the most captivating and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic novel you will ever read. The story hops around from the last day of the old world to 20 years later, following a number of characters based around Toronto. It is in the world of what becomes known as Year 20 that Mandel truly creates a unique future – no battling for resources, but a Travelling Symphony of musicians and actors who go from settlement to settlement performing Shakespeare plays.

That isn’t to say that Mandel’s world is a pastoral utopia – far from it. The main character, Kirsten, who was eight when the pandemic broke out and is now an actress with the Travelling Symphony, has wiped from her memory the horror of Year One as humanity descended into implied savagery. And while survivors have gathered in communities based around abandoned strip malls and old towns, there are still rapacious marauders and murderous prophets who believe they have been spared by God.

But Mandel’s message is that civilisation – and just as importantly, art – will endure as long as there is life. She tells us that when humanity’s back is against the wall, decency will emerge. Mandel has a beautiful writing style and the chapters preceding the apocalypse (the book jumps around in time) show an assured handle on human emotions and relationships, particularly those sequences involving Arthur Leander, an actor who dies on the night of the pandemic yet who casts a long shadow, even 20 years on.

Though not without tension and a sense of horror, Station Eleven rises above the bleakness of the usual post-apocalyptic novels because its central concept is one so rarely offered in the genre – hope.

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Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel: Review

Emily St. John Mandel explores our viral collapse in her National Book Award-shortlisted post-apocalypse novel

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British Columbia-born novelist Emily St. John Mandel assuredly knew about Ebola — a viral strain first identified in 1976 — when she imagined her “Georgia Flu” in her novel Station Eleven . But the Georgia Flu — named after the former Soviet republic — makes Ebola look like a case of the sniffles. If you touch an infected person, you’ll likely contract it; if you contract it, you’ll likely die. In Mandel’s imagination, the disease wipes out a vast swath of humanity — so much so that all our technologies, ranging from computers to motor vehicles, are rendered useless. After the Georgia Flu there is no electricity or fossil fuel. The Internet vanishes as if it had never existed. Society reverts to a scavenger economy, its members surviving through the use or adaptation of artifacts left behind by the dead.

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Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel: Review Back to video

then is a post-apocalypse novel, which begins one night when a fading movie star named 
Arthur Leander performs in a production of

at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre. Halfway through the performance 
Leander collapses on stage with a heart attack. A paramedic, one Jeevan Chaudhary, and a cardiologist in the audience attempt to revive Leander, but to no avail. Leander dies — and his passing seems to mark the last moments of normality on planet Earth. By the next day the alarm has rung, panic ensues, and nothing is ever the same again.

Why Mandel chooses to launch her narrative in this manner is not immediately clear, although it will make more sense to the reader as the novel proceeds. For one thing, Arthur Leander will turn out to be the node connecting all the major characters — his first wife Miranda, an artist who creates a graphic novel named Station Eleven about a lost space station; his old friend Clark Thompson, an organizational psychologist and corporate consultant who helps create a viable, post-apocalypse community of 300 or so individuals in an abandoned airport; Kirstin Raymonde, who appears on stage with Leander as a seven-or-eight-year-old child actress; and Jeevan Chaudhary, the paramedic who trains himself to be a physician in a world without hospitals or clinics.

Half the novel takes place before the Georgia Flu apocalypse and half about 20 years later, a dual narrative of sorts that offers Mandel an opportunity to make some implicit reflections on art, for one thing. Art and culture have always been a sore point of post-apocalypse novelists — it is hard, it seems, for writers envisioning the future to imagine what kind of art would characterize that future. In this respect, Mandel’s post-apocalypse does not suffer in comparison to the present, represented in her novel mostly by Hollywood and by celebrity culture. Chaudhary, for example, is a paparazzo before he decides to do something useful by becoming a paramedic.

Children who grew up with the apocalypse, meanwhile, can only marvel that once there were huge metal airplanes that flew through the air, and devices that enabled you to talk to a person on another continent

In the post-apocalypse world, by contrast, Kirsten joins a caravan of some 30 artists called the Travelling Symphony. They go from ruined town to ruined town, presenting classical music and Shakespeare. At first the troupe offers modern plays to their ravaged audiences, but soon discover to their surprise that these audiences prefer Shakespeare. This may seem improbable to some readers, but as a member of the troupe comments, “People want what was best about the world.” In a poignant note, Mandel informs us that the musician who made that pronouncement has found it difficult to live in the present. “He’d played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.”

As for contemporary art, Miranda with her comic books fulfils the remark of Ezra Pound that the artist is the antennae of the race. Her story, Station Eleven , written and drawn before the Georgia flu, is the story of humans marooned on a highly advanced space station which is more like a small planet. Presiding over the space station, with its “deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, orange and crimson skies with two moons on the horizon,” is a physicist named Dr. Eleven. There is also a restive population living beneath the oceans known as the Underseas. One of them assassinates a colleague of Dr. Eleven, and leaves a note: “We were not meant for this world. Let us go home.” Dr. Eleven reflects afterwards, “The first sentence of the assassin’s note rang true. We were not meant for this world. I returned to my city, to my shattered life and damaged home, to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

This is prophetic of the shattered life and loneliness of post-apocalypse men and women, survivors of a fearful plague who try to forget the sweetness of life on the Earth they once knew. Children who grew up with the apocalypse, meanwhile, can only marvel that once there were huge metal airplanes that flew through the air, and devices that enabled you to talk to a person on another continent.

Religion is another delicate matter for future fiction writers. If their doomsday is fairly close in time they are faced with the problem of what to do with organized religion, still a potent force in our society. One would think that in Mandel’s post-apocalypse the odd evangelical Protestant or observant Jew would wander through the landscape. (And what about the papacy? Does that still exist?) Mandel’s solution to this problem is to channel what religious fervour exists into malign cults, shedding blood at the behest of their insane leaders and twisted prophets. This is believable.

The collapse also reminds the reader that we live in what communications authority Eric 
McLuhan calls “a wild fairyland of our own making.” In this fairyland, marvels abound

As post-apocalypse novels go, the gracefully written and suspenseful Station Eleven is quite a bit less harrowing than, say, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful, though, especially in Mandel’s description of the first few days of the plague, when stranded passengers in airports come to realize they would never board a plane again, and they would never be rescued by National Guardsmen with cups of hot coffee and blankets. The collapse also reminds the reader that we live in what communications authority Eric 
McLuhan calls “a wild fairyland of our own making.” In this fairyland, marvels abound.

The collapse of all this into chaos brings to mind Gabriel Syme, the poet protagonist of G.K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday . Syme argues for the poetry of things working properly, for the beauty of the predictable, for the marvel of being able to take a subway train at Toronto’s Union Station and arrive with virtual certainty at St. Clair Avenue in that same city.

In this spirit of wonder 
Kirsten summons up a restored society, which she can hardly believe in. “You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light,” she imagines. “You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the 
Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth.”

No surprise the inhabitants of Station Eleven , and the inhabitants of long-
abandoned airports, yearn for this fairyland.

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A New York Tate of Mind

• Sep 18, 2023

Review: Station Eleven

Updated: May 19

Re-read of Station Eleven , by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

I first read this book in 2017, when the realities of a worldwide pandemic still felt like sci-fi (maybe not to a lot of scientists and epidemiologists, but to me, at least). I've been wanting to re-read it in today's world, where we know what's possible.

In Station Eleven , a highly contagious and fast-acting virus effectively causes the complete collapse of civilization. So many people perish (99.6%) that, for those that survive, it can feel like they're the only ones left, at least in the first few weeks and months after the collapse. Soon, though, people begin to find each other and establish small settlements. Or, like one of the protagonists, Kirsten, join a group of wandering musicians and actors, collectively called The Traveling Symphony, that brings music and Shakespearean plays to the communities it travels between.

The narrative volleys back and forth in time, with "day 1" being the first day the pandemic arrives in Toronto, Canada, where young Kirsten is acting in a performance of King Lear. The marquee actor, Arthur Leander, dies of a heart attack on stage. A EMT trainee from the audience named Jeevan leaps on stage to perform CPR. From there, we follow Kirsten, Jeevan, and Arthur's multiple ex-wives and son through the pandemic all the way to "year 20," as well as learning of their pasts (in particular, Arthur's past and how he met his wives). The past and present are blended together seamlessly, as many characters from the past begin to cross paths in the burnt out, terrifying version of North America. Amid all this, Kirsten encounters a man who calls himself simply, The Prophet - a man who has amassed a cult following, and terrorizes communities into submission. She soon finds that she and The Prophet have something very specific in common from the pre-pandemic world.

I don't know if it was more meaningful than when I read it in 2017, but I do think it hit closer to home. This book obviously shows a much more extreme version of a pandemic than the one we witnessed (and continue to grapple with). But in 2017, it was pure supposition to me, whereas in 2023... I get it. I get how rapidly things can fall apart - the panic, the bulk purchasing, the every-man-for-himself mentality, the denial, the hospitals filling up. I get that if Covid-19 had been even more contagious, rapid, and deadly, we might be right where Kirsten and the other 4% of survivors find themselves in Station Eleven . I also see the humanity that shines through, and the belief that communities can reform, creating families of people who care for each other.

This is one of the very few post-apocolyptic books that I really loved. It was clever and thoughtful and haunting. Station Eleven feels realistic in both its portrayals of the chaos and violence of collapse, as well as the strength of character that continues to create community, art, and hope amidst it.

Highly recommend! I don't know much about the TV show based on this book. I've heard mixed reviews, and I think I like the book too much to risk ruining it for myself.

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• What Is Cinema?

Station Eleven Is a Disarmingly Hopeful Post-Apocalyptic Tale

When Emily St. John Mandel ’s bestselling novel Station Eleven debuted in 2014, North American culture (and beyond) was gripped with post-apocalypse fascination. Y.A. fiction was rife with dystopia, thanks in large part to The Hunger Games and its attendant film franchise. The Walking Dead was one of the biggest shows in the world; HBO’s The Leftovers would appear that year, too. 

Mandel’s book, then, was greeted as something of a refreshment. The novel is a decades-spanning look at the immediate onset and long-lingering effects of a flu pandemic that kills billions. The ragged, miraculously hopeful survivors (well, some of them are hopeful, anyway) begin to form new societies and customs, wary and laden with loss but still possessed of humanity’s inner fire, its hunger for connection and some kind of earthly transcendence. This was no zombie horror, but rather an expansively poetic musing on a species’s capacity to endure. Station Eleven rescues something like comfort out of all its boggling sorrow. 

It’s a gorgeous and satisfying novel, dense with crisscrossing narratives and recurring motifs. It is, somehow, richly cinematic while seeming entirely unfilmable. For all the novel’s talk of the performing arts—the central storyline follows a traveling theater company as they make their way around the Great Lakes region, 20 years after the plague— Station Eleven is very dependent on its interior prose; its lyrical observations and ruminations; its intricate but gentle threading of disparate plots and characters. There is action and occasion in the story, but it’s described from a watchful remove, with a summative omniscience. 

But dreamers are going to dream. And so the television writer Patrick Somerville ( The Leftovers , Maniac ) set out to adapt Station Eleven anyway, employing a small team of writers and collaborating with Atlanta director Hiro Murai to set the show’s bespoke visual language. The result, also called Station Eleven (HBO Max, December 16), is scattershot and transfixing, an adaptation that honors much of Mandel’s tone and intent but alters and expands (not always for the better) the world she so wondrously built. 

The bones are the same, with some location shifts. A flu breaks out in 2020. Most people die quickly, but some—naturally immune or just very lucky—make it through. An 8-year-old girl, Kirsten ( Matilda Lawler ), is thrown into the protective custody of a hangdog journalist, Jeevan ( Himesh Patel ), once it becomes clear her family died while Kirsten was at the theater where she was to play a minor role in a Chicago production of King Lear , starring a movie star, Arthur Leander ( Gael Garcia Bernal ). Arthur’s ex-wife, Miranda ( Danielle Deadwyler ), a logistics expert in the shipping industry who is also working on a graphic novel called Station Eleven , gets stuck in Malaysia as the crisis reaches a frenzied crescendo, while Arthur’s sodden old friend, Clark ( David Wilmot ), finds himself marooned at a small Michigan airport with another of Arthur’s exes, actress Elizabeth ( Caitlin FitzGerald ). 

These characters, and more, are spun off on different trajectories that, in their elliptical structure, occasionally intersect as the years tumble along. The show, like so many mini-series of the moment, is told in multiple timelines—a frustrating device on even an assured show such as this. Mandel’s novel also jumps around between present and future, but that’s easier to follow on the page. 

Station Eleven the series smartly mitigates some of that disorientation (while encouraging it elsewhere) by devoting certain episodes to a handful of characters in one time and place. The grander mural of interconnectivity—all this fate and chance dancing around these curious happenings, following these characters over the course of their lives—is revealed only in aggregate, once the viewer has made their way through all 10 episodes and can regard the finished product in its quilted completion. 

Watching those ten episodes is not exactly easy. For obvious reasons, seeing obliviousness turn to dread as characters learn of the virus’s swift spread provokes a certain familiar anxiety that gives way to an aching, bone-deep sadness. In that way, a viewer must place real trust in Station Eleven ’s characters to lead them toward the story’s version of deliverance. There’s something instructive in that. The series perhaps most resonantly functions as a map out of despair, or at least toward some acceptance of the belief that, as many things fall apart, new purpose and meaning may begin to poke up out of the ruined earth—for a fortunate few, anyway. 

Art is, in Station Eleven ’s view, one of the chief vessels of that renewal and resilience. An older Kirsten, played by Mackenzie Davis , is a member of the Travelling Symphony, a merry-ish band of players and musicians who tinker around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a caravan, bringing a few nights of revelry and solemn wonder (often in the form of Shakespeare plays) to the various rickety settlements they return to each year on their cyclical migration. Miranda’s comic book is the most persistent talisman of all, bearing heavily on the worldviews of Kirsten and another character who was also a child when the world ended. 

The way Station Eleven traces a piece of culture as it traverses human epochs will remind some theatergoers of Anne Washburn ’s 2012 play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play , which follows a Simpsons episode’s evolution into ritual lore over the many years after a calamity. Both works persuasively imagine a text’s eternal value, and more broadly consider how fundamental storytelling, recitation, and the generational exchange of thought are to the human experience. 

Station Eleven the series could do a little more to embolden that idea, though. There are a few arresting sequences where the art being performed mirrors and informs the life of the characters. Andrew Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World” is directly evoked in one tableau, perhaps suggesting that an alignment of place and person and perspective, in one form framed and buried in a dusty and empty MoMA, may somehow naturally emerge again out of the chaos of the world. But the specific content of the eponymous graphic novel remains a bit too vague for how heavily some of its imagery is leaned upon. Its message and import is implied, but never quite elucidated.

As was probably a requirement of a big-budget TV series like this, Station Eleven also ramps up the violence and danger, making some rather large changes to Mandel’s story to create more convergent tension. This means that some of the show’s more intellectual and emotional throughlines get less time than they might otherwise—and certainly less than they deserve. Even with those flashier, more sellable additions, though, Station Eleven could still prove too deliberate and elusive for some viewers, just as The Leftovers did. It’s a series that demands both close attention and a passive willingness to let the words and meticulously crafted images wash over you, a collage that gradually forms itself but still demands your engagement. 

Not all of the various story pieces click seamlessly into place. Some digressions bear ripe thematic fruit; others tread riskily close to artsy indulgence. The performances are consistently strong, all studies in the scratchy idiosyncrasy and variance of people. Characters behave poorly and heroically, they are selfish and generous—a generosity that, by the close of the series, has begun to seem like the true great work of living among a community, hard won and yet as natural as any more harmful impulse. 

Hovering over all this is the lonely astronaut of Miranda’s graphic novel, glimpsed on occasion by characters in moments of need or release. Maybe the astronaut is the God of a whole religion not yet built or discovered. Maybe he’s us in the past, gazing at one version of our difficult future. Maybe he is simply the manifestation of all of our vast and petty human questions, a reminder of our mortality and of some endless cosmic ribbon passing through each of us. 

Much of the Station Eleven watched over by this astronaut is tattered and forlorn. Gulping down the show this week has led to some odd and melancholy dreams, along with a few waking moments of existential unease. But a warming grace slowly envelops Station Eleven , and its audience. Perhaps the faith the series places in messy, errant us seems largely unearned these days. And yet there it is anyway: a hand stretched out in offering, a voice saying something like keep going.

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Station Eleven Is a Profound Television Experience

I know what you’re going to say about Station Eleven , and I get it. After nearly two years of living through a pandemic in real life, the last thing you want to do is watch a show about a pandemic.

But here’s the thing, and I say this with the utmost respect and love: You are wrong. Station Eleven , an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s superb, unexpectedly prescient 2014 novel , is a limited series you should see, not despite the stress we’ve endured in 2020 and 2021 but because of it. Created by Patrick Somerville, whose past credits include Made for Love , Maniac, and, most tellingly, The Leftovers , Station Eleven is a beautifully wrought piece of storytelling that will certainly remind audiences of the coronavirus — it focuses on a flu that spreads rapidly, causing panic, quarantining, and an immense loss of life — but it also presents a much more extreme version of a pandemic than the one we’ve confronted.

The sickness in this HBO Max series, whose first three episodes drop on Thursday, instantly starts taking out humans and basic infrastructure to such an extent that it seems non-hyperbolic when it is referred to as “the end of the world.” (Audio from a television broadcast notes that the survival rate with this flu is one in 1,000 and that Chicago, where the series is initially set, “is not Chicago anymore. It’s just 2.5 million bodies.”) Yet Station Eleven is, at its core, an uplifting reaffirmation of the value of life and human connection that argues that Americans can and will come together to help one another in the most dire of circumstances.

Somerville and his fellow writers have done a very smart job of interpreting Mandel’s work, keeping key elements, excising others, and reshaping the narrative to make this series function as both a postapocalyptic account and commentary on the role art plays in sustaining and fortifying the human spirit during times of crisis. Given the involvement of Somerville and executive producer–writer Nick Cuse, another alum of The Leftovers , it’s not surprising that the tone of Station Eleven feels of a piece with that HBO drama, another moving portrait of what happens in the aftermath of a tragedy. Like The Leftovers , Station Eleven doesn’t spend any time attempting to explain its catalytic event — we never learn exactly how this flu spread so quickly or why it could not be contained. These ten episodes are much more interested in how human beings cope when they try to go on after losing nearly everyone they love and everything that once was familiar.

The series opens in more or less the same way the novel does, with actor Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) collapsing onstage in the middle of a production of King Lear . Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an audience member, is one of the first to recognize what is happening to Arthur — and the only person in the ensuing chaos to take one of the young members of the cast, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), under his wing and help her get home from the theater. Unfortunately, the concept of home fundamentally changes overnight as the contagion and news about it spreads, leading Jeevan and his brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), to become Kirsten’s guardians.

Station Eleven slides in all directions on its x-y-axis, moving forward in time 20 years, when we find the adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) on the road with a roving band of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony, and back again to the earliest days of the outbreak as well as to events that occurred before it. A number of shows this year have tried, with varied success, to adopt a similar time-jumping structure, but few have managed it with the sense of purpose and elegance that Station Eleven does. In the two years we’ve spent living with COVID, most of us have learned that our sense of time gets incredibly skewed during a pandemic. Days, months, and years blur together. They do too in Station Eleven , in which images of a barely occupied, overgrown Chicago two decades in the future are folded into moments when the flu has just begun and the city still looks normal. Dialogue from conversations that took place years earlier bleed into what is happening in 2040.

Even though there is a hard dividing line between pre- and post-pandemic life, the series emphasizes that history still finds a way to repeat itself and creep into the present even when we think it’s all been packed away. All four of the series’ directors — Hiro Murai, Jeremy Podeswa, Helen Shaver, and Lucy Tcherniak — lean into that overlapping, almost dreamy quality without sacrificing the stark realities of what’s involved in surviving without modern resources.

The scope also expands to focus on multiple figures within its massive ensemble, including Clark (David Wilmot), a friend of Arthur’s who is traveling to retrieve his body when all hell breaks loose; Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), an actress with whom Arthur has a child and who eventually becomes connected to Clark; the Conductor (Lori Petty), the outspoken, quietly heartbroken leader of the Symphony; Alex (Philippine Velge), a member of the troupe who has more or less been raised by Kirsten; and Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthur’s ex-wife who wrote, illustrated, and self-published a graphic novel called Station Eleven . Text from Miranda’s comic, which was passed on to young Kirsten in the early days of the pandemic, echoes throughout the episodes as though its verses are biblical. “I remember damage” is a line uttered more than once; “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die” is another. While these quotes come from the graphic novel, they resonate strongly with what the characters in the series are experiencing, a reflection of how fiction and art can feel as though they’ve been tailored specifically to the present and the contours of one’s own private heart.

This is a theme the series touches upon over and over again — when the Symphony’s actors find transcendence through Shakespeare, or Frank busts out a rap he spent days working on, or young Kirsten softly, but not without joy, sings “The First Noel” at a particularly bleak turning point a few days before Christmas. (All of the performances in this series are excellent, but I can’t say enough about what a grounded and pure presence Lawler is here. She’s just extraordinary and makes an entirely believable 1.0 version of Davis.) Music, theater, and literature can provide both an escape from our circumstances and a way of processing them that becomes forever intertwined with those circumstances. Nothing illustrates that more effectively than the comic Station Eleven and the way Kirsten treasures it as both a tether to the before times and a means of shedding the shackles of time altogether. “Arthur gave me Station Eleven ,” the elder Kirsten explains in episode eight. “And when I read it, it didn’t matter that the world was ending. Because it was the world.”

The fact that Kirsten and others derive such pleasure and meaning from Station Eleven , the graphic novel, during a pandemic becomes even more profound when one realizes that Station Eleven , the HBO Max adaptation, does something similar for us during our own pandemic. Our world isn’t ending even though COVID is still a presence in it. But when you watch Station Eleven and become immersed in it, it really does become the whole wide world. What a gift.

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Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The book begins with a stage play of King Lear . Arthur Leander is an A-list celebrity who drops dead during the performance, an event that might otherwise dominate a fame-obsessed culture. However, this night marks the beginning of a super-flu outbreak that begins in Toronto and explodes “like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth.” Ninety-nine percent of people die, leaving the world pockmarked with survivors. Among the living is Kirstin Raymonde, one of the girls in the play. As Station Eleven oscillates between descriptions of the flu as it unravels and twenty years later when the world is still reshaping, Arthur’s rise to fame and Kirstin’s post-apocalyptic life draw the focus of the narrative.

As an adult, Kirstin has the rough edges one might expect from having lived through an apocalypse, though she isn’t entirely jaded. She is part of the Travelling Symphony, a group of actors performing Shakespeare as they roam from town to town through wild backcountry. Kirstin saves magazine clippings about Arthur that she finds in abandoned houses. Her motivation is driven in part by her memory loss—she cannot recall the year of the collapse—but also by the fact that Arthur’s fame has encapsulated him in time. The clippings comfort Kirstin because they anchor her in a world that was simpler, safer, and easier to live in, even if she cannot remember it well.

Aside from Kirstin’s friends in the Travelling Symphony, the rest of the characters in the novel are products of Arthur’s life: his ex-wives, children, agents, friends, and even the paparazzi who photographed him. Those who have survived the flu have their own unique journeys into Year Twenty and Mandel excels at weaving these lives together as the mystery and suspense of Station Eleven propels readers forward. A post-apocalyptic novel does run the risk of being cliché. Readers are saturated with stories about a future our civilization cannot predict but seems obsessed with foretelling. And Mandel’s depiction of a fallen world has many of the elements you might expect. “Ferals” roam the countryside, religious cults threaten to usurp peaceful communities, and starvation and loneliness are constant pressures. However, for a book about the world’s collapse, Station Eleven is remarkably quiet. Its interests seem more aligned with examining ideas of nostalgia, memory, and art than thrilling with knife fights (though there are those, too).

As Kirstin leaves an abandoned house she wonders about a time when people locked their doors: “That’s what it would have been like, she realized, living in a house. You would leave and lock the door behind you, and all through the day you would carry a key.” Mandel’s characters often reflect on old-world relics. They think about cars, planes, iPhones, computers—even high heels—but these contemplations are hardly shallow. Like Kirstin’s interest in Arthur’s celebrity clippings, they offer a reflection of contemporary life, a single layer of modern happiness.

Mandel pushes this idea further with deeper examinations of what it means to be happy. When Kirstin thinks: “Hell is the absence of the people you long for” she voices an age-old declaration. It isn’t the material things that matter, but the people you share your life with and the honesty with which you’ve been living it. Other characters echo this sentiment. One of Arthur’s friends recalls a report he was working on, a document he carried on a flight as the flu broke out. He reads a piece of transcribed dialogue: “That’s what passes for a life… That’s what passes for happiness…” In remembering how much the statement affected him he wonders, “when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration?”

As Station Eleven considers happiness both on a profound level and in material pleasures, it brings a thoughtful perspective to a fallen world. Its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world aligns more with Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars , another quiet novel where a super flu has wiped out the population, than stories like The Walking Dead , On the Road , or World War Z . Station Eleven implies that a major collapse might cripple the world, but would not ruin it, nor the people who remain. Most of Station Eleven’s characters remain good at heart, simple even, clinging to memories that reflect the old world both profoundly and superficially. After all, it is a line from Star Trek Voyager: “Survival is insufficient” and not, say, a line from Shakespeare that is the Travelling Symphony’s mantra. Perhaps Mandel is saying art, memory, and remembrance are just as significant as more lowbrow cultural landmarks, and in the face of the world’s bleak landscape it is okay to long for both in equal measure.

Reviewed by Kim Winternheimer

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REVIEW: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Dear Ms. Mandel,

I first heard of Station Eleven , your post-apocalyptic literary novel, when my friend, author Meredith Duran, recommended it to me. I was a bit hesitant to read it — literary fiction can be emotionally hard on me — but it turned out that this novel, for all that it deals with loss, feels tender and hopeful.

Jeevan Chaudhary, an audience member who once worked as paparazzo and entertainment journalist and is now training to be a paramedic, jumps onto the stage and administers CPR until medical assistance arrives. Jeevan once stalked Arthur as a paparazzo, once interviewed him as a journalist, and now wants to save his life, but is unable to do so. Arthur dies.

One of the child actresses, eight year old Kirsten Raymonde, witnesses Arthur’s death. Jeevan tries to comfort her until the show’s wrangler arrives to take her. Jeevan, whose girlfriend has long since left the theater, wanders outside in a snowstorm.

Members of the show’s cast gather at the bar in the lobby to discuss who should first be informed of the thrice-divorced Arthur’s passing. They settle on his lawyer. Then the second chapter ends this way:

In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. “To Arthur,” they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Of all of them at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.

Jeevan has boarded a streetcar when the phone call from his friend Hua comes. Hua, a doctor, is calling to alert Jeevan to the arrival of a new and virulent epidemic known as the Georgia flu in Toronto.

A frantic Jeevan gets off the streetcar and shops for several shopping carts’ worth of groceries to stockpile while calling his girlfriend to warn her. Then he heads to his brother Frank’s apartment.

Sixty dollars later Jeevan was alone outside his brother’s apartment door, the carts lined up down the corridor. Perhaps, he thought, he should have called ahead from the grocery store. It was one a.m. on a Thursday night, the corridor all closed doors and silence. “Jeevan,” Frank said, when he came to the door. “An unexpected pleasure.” “I…” Jeevan didn’t know how to explain himself, so he stepped back and gestured weakly at the carts instead of speaking. Frank maneuvered his wheelchair forward and peered down the hall. “I see you went shopping,” he said.

The novel then shifts to Arthur Leander’s lawyer, who calls Arthur’s closest friend, Clark Thompson, and asks him to deliver the news of Arthur’s death to Arthur’s ex-wives. Miranda, the first of these and a shipping company executive, is in Malaysia when she gets the call.

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth. The conversation in Spanish went on in the nearby darkness. The ships still shone on the horizon; there was still no breeze. It was morning in New York City. She imagined Clark hanging up the receiver in his office in Manhattan. This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.

When we reconnect with one of the characters, twenty years have passed. Kirsten Raymonde, the child actress in the King Lear production, is now twenty-eight and part of a troupe of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony. The Symphony mostly sticks to familiar territory in the middle of what was once the U.S., along Lakes Michigan and Huron.

In this era, most “towns” are composed of a few families clustered together. So few people survived the Georgia Flu that the land through which the Symphony travels is mostly empty, though littered with the skeletons of rusted cars that aren’t operable any longer. Gasoline production has ceased.

The Symphony performs music and Shakespeare, which is what people hunger for most now. As they travel, they memorize their lines and carry knives, in case they meet with danger on the road.

But it is not on the road that the Symphony meets with danger, but in the small settlement of St. Deborah by the Water. Two years before, they left two members of their troupe in this “town” – Kirsten’s pregnant best friend Charlie and her partner Jeremy.

Not only are Charlie and Jeremy missing now, but the townspeople are oddly unfriendly, and a twelve year old girl follows Kirsten when she tries to find out what happened to Jeremy and Charlie. The midwife tells Kirsten that Charlie had a healthy baby girl before leaving a year before.

”Your friend rejected the prophet’s advances,” she whispered, close to Kirsten’s ear. “They had to leave town. Stop asking questions and tell your people to leave here as quickly as possible.”

After discovering graves for Charlie and Jeremy, The Symphony does just that. Believing the graves may be empty and that the town’s prophet and his followers could be in pursuit, they turn south. But no one knows what lies in that direction… the rumored Museum of Civilization, to which Charlie and Jeremy may have attempted to escape, or danger and possibly even death?

Station Eleven is large in scope yet comes across as intimate. It is narrated in omniscient voice and flows effortlessly back and forward in time, and back and forward again. The nonlinear structure illuminates what was lost with the arrival of the Georgia Flu—so many lives, and a way of life that seems as distant as a fairytale to those born later—as well as what has remained.

The book follows the lives of five major characters – Kirsten, Jeevan, Arthur, Miranda, and Arthur’s friend Clark. Not all of them survive, but each is depicted with clarity but also with a forgiving affection. Most are shown through a before-and-after lens that allows the novel to not only grieve for, but celebrate, what was best about their old world while marveling at the wonders of the new one.

The novel is concerned less with the physical struggle for survival, and more with the needs of the human spirit. The Traveling Symphony’s lead caravan is emblazoned with the line, taken from an old episode of Star Trek Voyager, “Because survival is insufficient.” That sentence is both a mission statement for the Symphony, and a theme in the novel. After survival has been achieved, what else might bloom if nurtured?

I’ve quoted liberally from the beginning of the book because I loved the writing, and didn’t know how else to do justice to the stark beauty of the sentences or to the novel’s unexpected suspensfulness. I also loved the characters – from Miranda, who, after her divorce from Arthur, finds two lines of work to satisfy her and feed her soul, to Jeevan and Clark who struggle for a similar kind of satisfaction.

From Kirsten, to whom the Symphony is now a family, and who collects articles about Arthur Leander, the last person from the time before whom she remembers, to Arthur himself, a Hollywood actor in the time before the virus, a man who leads a shallow life but discovers what is most important in his eleventh hour.

I have just two complaints about this book: that Arthur is initially harder to care about than the other characters, partly since he lived before the Georgia Flu swept across the world, and partly due to his personality, and that I experienced mild confusion about the timing of the publication of a book about Arthur. But later in the book, both of these issues resolve satisfactorily.

The novel leaves it to us to make up our minds about the characters’ choices, and never judges them for us. Since this is literary fiction (albeit with some genre elements), it’s best not to wait for all the threads to connect at once, or for a detailed description of the days when the survivors fought each other for resources.

Station Eleven takes its title from two graphic novels Arthur gave the child Kirsten which the adult Kirsten still carries with her. In those volumes, Station Eleven is a traveling space station, home to Dr. Eleven and to castaways from earth who live beneath bridged islands, in the Undersea. To Dr. Eleven and to the residents of the Undersea, the loss of earth is a tragedy, but it does not negate the beauty of their new surroundings.

Similarly, the novel Station Eleven explores not only loss and damage, but also what is best about humanity, what we have to look forward to so long as we remain. The gentle yet clear-eyed compassion of the novel’s voice infuses the book with a kind of tenderness. Even in the tough post-virus environment, there is still a love of music and story. There are still grace notes, there is still a need for connection, and there is still love. If, as in Shakespeare’s words, life is a brief candle, then it is one whose luminous beauty cannot be denied. A-/A.

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Janine Ballard loves well-paced, character-driven novels in romance, fantasy, YA, and the occasional outlier genre. Examples include novels by Ilona Andrews, Mary Balogh, Aster Glenn Gray, Helen Hoang, Piper Huguley, Lisa Kleypas, Jeannie Lin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Naomi Novik, Nalini Singh, and Megan Whalen Turner. Janine also writes fiction. Her critique partners are Sherry Thomas and Meredith Duran. Her erotic short story, “Kiss of Life,” appears in the Berkley anthology AGONY/ECSTASY under the pen name Lily Daniels. You can email Janine at janineballard at gmail dot com or find her on Twitter @janine_ballard.

I really liked this book too – horrifying and uplifting at the same time. I’m not a huge post-apocalyptic novel fan, but this one appealed to me because it focused more on the characters and less on the disaster itself.

I received the same recommendation from Ms. Duran. I wasn’t sure about a post-virus apocalypse story, but she called it correctly; this is a wonderful book that has stuck with me. I think about the characters with affection and contemplate how the arts give substance and meaning to our lives.

Great review, Janine. I enjoyed the book but less than you did.

The novel is concerned less with the physical struggle for survival, and more with the needs of the human spirit.

I had a harder time buying into this premise. With 98% of the world’s population gone, I was interested in survivors learning to live without any modern conveniences (so much of which we take for granted). Survival may not be enough but I had a harder time than you accepting that survival had been so easily achieved.

Also, there seemed an enormous amount of resources in urban areas were somehow deemed unusable which I didn’t buy. I’d head for hardware stores (bet you could run a microwave on a car battery for months) and nursery greenhouses and libraries (for books on organic farming and building simple batteries, etc.) so the glimpses we get of travelers raiding random houses here and there was evocative but frustrating.

But the characters were certainly vivid and Mandel did a good job of fleshing them all out and making me care what happened to them. I especially enjoyed Clark’s museum of modern memorabilia and tried to imagine what item I’d want to donate. I thought Arthur Leander was an interesting choice as the tie that sort of binds it all together, especially since the book opens with his death.

@ SusanS : I found it more uplifting than horrifying but I’ve read a fair amount of post-apocalyptic stuff (mostly in YA).

@ Karenmc : Yes, it really is a book that sticks with the reader.

You might like Susan Beth Pfeffer’s The Dead and the Gone , a post apocalyptic novel about a teenage boy trying to survive and ensure the survival of his sisters in New York City. It’s the second book in a series but can be read as a standalone — in fact I think it’s best read as a standalone.

Re. Station Eleven , I so totally see your points, and yet that wasn’t what I wanted from the novel. I found its focus refreshing.

I thought there were surely people who stayed in cities and did all the things you suggested in this world, we just didn’t see that on the page, because the novel spends so much time in the era before the virus and 20 years later, and in the long term, there are probably better survival odds in the country, where animals can be hunted and crops can be grown.

In addition only Jeevan was actually shown leaving the city and he chose that due to hearing gun battles there. We also heard about Kirsten and her brother, but they were kids. In any case, I didn’t think survival was easily achieved, just that some of the difficulties of achieving it were skipped over.

I think you were able to appreciate exactly what the author was trying to convey. I sort of wish I hadn’t been in such a practical frame of mind when I read this. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll check it out.

I loved this book. It was one of my favourite reads last year. I loved it for all the reasons you say. I loved it because it was hopeful and because, to me, it was about how our lives have value and are important. I also loved the writing. It was very striking and even now, months later, there are random images that have stuck in my mind… the snowflakes falling on-stage, the plane stopped on the runway… very haunting.

@ Rosario :

I loved it because it was hopeful and because, to me, it was about how our lives have value and are important.

This. And yes on the imagery! Those images you mention, and some of the ones from the graphic novel, are so very eerie and beautiful.

Thanks for the wonderful review Janine. I gave this book to my 80 yr-old mother for Christmas (it’s become a tradition that we exchange 3-5 books), and she loved it.

@ Kate L : Thanks! I’m glad to hear your mother enjoyed it too.

This reminds me a little of one of my favourite books as kid, The Girl Who Owned A City. In that book all people over the age of 12 are killed by a virus and the children must learn to survive on their own. There is a lot of politics and philosophy in the book which went over my head as a kid–but it was interesting how Lisa, the main character, wanted to raid supermarket warehouses and build a fortress in the high school while her friend wanted to learn how to farm and find a sustainable way forward. I should read it again as an adult!

@ Kate Hewitt : I haven’t read The Girl Who Owned a City but if I’m not mistaken, DA Jennie once mentioned it to me. I believe it was one of her favorite books when she was a kid, too.

I loved this book. It wasn’t what I expected but I found it both suspenseful and hopeful. I loved the way she tighed up all the threads.

Tied. Sigh.

@ DB Tait : Yes, suspenseful and hopeful is a good way to describe it. It was lovely, wasn’t it?

I LOVED this book! Please tell me here will be a sequel! I have to know what happens to these characters that I grew to care about!! I This is one of those rare books when I can’t stop thinking about and wondering what is happening. Highly recommend!

@ Elaine : Glad to hear you enjoyed it too! I don’t know if there are any plans for a sequel, but if one ever comes out you can be sure I’ll read and review it.

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Things to do | the best things to do this weekend in san diego: aug. 9-11, our list of top things to do this weekend includes concerts, author events, fan fest and more.

Summer Concert at Point Loma Park: The Point Loma Summer Concert series continues, featuring the Pine Mountain Logs rock band. There is entertainment for all ages, a raffle that benefits school music programs, and food vendors. Bring lawn chairs, blankets, and picnic baskets. 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Friday. Point Loma Park, 1049 Catalina Blvd., San Diego. Admission is free. Visit pointlomasummerconcerts.org.

‘Return of the Jedi’ in concert:  The San Diego Symphony will play along with “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.” The performances on two nights this weekend will be conducted by Norman Huynh.  7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park. Tickets start at $63.  theshell.org/performances/list/

“35MM: A Musical Exhibition”:  Trinity Theatre presents this concert musical by Ryan Scott Oliver featuring 15 original songs inspired by the work of national theater photographer Matthew Murphy.  Opens Friday and runs through Aug. 25. 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Mission Valley Mall, Suite 129, 1640 Camino Del Rio North, San Diego. $25. (619) 500-9176,  trinityttc.org

Stargazing at Mission Trails:  On the first Friday of each month, the San Diego Astronomy Association hosts a star party at Mission Trails Regional Park. Weather permitting, guests can view the night sky through telescopes.  Kumeyaay Lake Campground, 2 Father Junipero Serra Trail, San Diego. Free.  sdaa.org/sdaa-events/#SMT

“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”: Lamb’s Players Theatre presents William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin’s audience-interactive comedy musical about five awkward adolescent contestants at a regional spelling bee. 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Aug. 18. Lamb’s Players Theatre, 1142 Orange Ave., Coronado. $38-$92. (619) 437-6000, lambsplayers.org

Summer concerts at SeaWorld: SeaWorld San Diego’s Summer Spectacular Concert Series continues with Hunter Hayes on Saturday. The concert lineup includes Grammy-nominated and chart-topping performers. The concerts are held Saturdays through Aug. 24 featuring R&B, pop and other music. Concerts are included with park admission. 6 p.m. Saturday. 500 SeaWorld Drive, San Diego. seaworld.com/san-diego/events/summer-spectacular/concerts

Snakes topic of lagoon talk: Batiquitos Lagoon will put on a presentation on “The Snakes We Live With” led by Bruce Ireland and Allan Chornak along with their volunteers who relocate snakes from homes to natural habitats. Attendees can meet venomous and nonvenomous snakes, including recent rescues from the area. The family event is open to ages 4 and older. Space is limited; first come, first served. It is recommended to come 15 minutes early. 10 a.m. Saturday. Meet at the Nature Center, 7380 Gabbiano Lane. Free. Visit batiquitoslagoon.org.

ArtFest : The annual Chula Vista ArtFest features more than 30 artists exhibiting at the Art Showcase wall and more than 60 vendor booths. There will be live performances and artists will be creating works based on the theme “Written in the Stars.” 6 p.m. Saturday. City Hall Complex, 276 Fourth Ave., Chula Vista. Admission is free. Visit cvartfest.com.

Author of ‘Anatomy: A Love Story’ to speak at library: The Oceanside Public Library hosts bestselling author Dana Schwartz for a talk as part of the teen Summer Reading Program. Schwartz hosts the history podcast Noble Blood produced by iHeartRadio, which she tells the behind the scenes stories of royals throughout history. Schwartz is author of five books, including the No. 1 New York Times and No. 1 indie bestseller, “Anatomy: A Love Story” and its sequel, “Immortality: A Love Story.” The first 50 guests will receive a free copy of “Anatomy: A Love Story,” a young adult novel for ages 13 and up. No registration is required. 5 p.m. Saturday. Mission Branch Library, 3861-B Mission Ave., Visit oceansidelibrary.org.

Aztec Fan Fest: Fans can get an early look at the 2024 Aztec team at this night of football and festivities. Tickets must be claimed online. 5 p.m. Saturday. Snapdragon Stadium, 2101 Stadium Way, San Diego. Free. am.ticketmaster.com/sdsu/buy/AztecFanFest

Summer Market: A San Diego-centric market place will open this weekend in Liberty Station with more that 120 local craft makers, small businesses and brands selling unique items. Visitors will also be able to see live music, participate in family activities and games, attend workshops and pose for photo opportunities. Food trucks and other vendors will also sell various cocktails, mocktails and other dining options. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Free. Liberty Station’s North Promenade, 2875 Dewey Road, San Diego. sdmademarkets.com/summer-market

‘Sugar King of California’ topic of history talk: The Rancho Bernardo Historical Society Speakers Series hosts Sandra E. Bonura, historian and award-winning author, for a presentation about her new book, “The Sugar King of California: The Story of Claus Spreckels.” 11 a.m. Saturday. Rancho Bernardo History Museum, Bernardo Winery, 13330 Paseo del Verano Norte. Free. Visit rbhistory.org.

Island Vibe Music Festival: The Island Vibe Music Festival features musical performers and dancers from across the Pacific Islands, including Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. Highlights include a vendor village showcasing Islander-inspired merchandise, art, apparel and food. 1 to 7 p.m. Saturday. Embarcadero Marina Park North, 400 Kettner Blvd. The event Tickets are $17.85 at eventbrite.com/e/island-vibe-music-festival-2024-tickets-859766794627.

‘Toxic Flora of Balboa Park’ subject of horticultural tour: A free horticultural tour will be held from focusing on “Toxic Flora of Balboa Park.” This tour highlights Balboa Park’s examples of plants to treat with caution. Forever Balboa Park offers thematic park tours that focus on the park’s unique biodiversity on the second Saturday of each month, led by park volunteer and horticultural enthusiast Bill Edwards. 10 to 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Balboa Park Visitors Center, 1549 El Prado. Visit foreverbalboapark.org/experience/visitors-center/#tours.

French macaron classes: Cocu Social is hosting French macaron classes on Saturday and Sept. 7. Participants will learn all the steps to prepare and bake these French treats from a pastry chef. Ticketed guests will be paired in groups of two to four people. This introductory course is open to all. 2 p.m. Saturday and Sept. 7. 8000 Parkway Drive, La Mesa. $50-$59. cocusocial.com/cooking-classes/sandiego

Free movie in the park: “Barbie” is the final movie of the summer for the free Movies in the Park series. 8 p.m. Saturday. Brengle Terrace Park Softball Fields, 1200 Vale Terrace Drive. Admission is free. Visit cityofvista.com/residents/movies-in-the-park.

“What’s Your Type”?”: As part of the World Design Capital 2024 celebration, the Athenaeum Art Center presents this exhibition of typographical creativity in the form of signs, murals, block-printing, letterpress design and more. Opens with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday and runs through Oct. 25. Athenaeum Art Center, 1955 Julian Ave., Logan Heights. (858) 454-5872, ljathenaeum.org

“Derecho”: La Jolla Playhouse presents the world premiere of Noelle Vinas’ play about two very different Latina sisters facing off while a massive storm approaches their Virginia home. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Aug. 18. Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UCSD La Jolla.: $29-$74. (858) 550-1010, lajollaplayhouse.org

Kids in the Garden class: A Kids in the Garden class will be held with a theme of, “Water All Around Us.” Participants will learn about how the community uses water and how residents can save water. Highlights will include making bubbles, ice, floating boats, watercolors, mud and origami hearts. 10 a.m. to noon Saturday. Alta Vista Botanical Gardens, 1270 Vale Terrace Drive. $5 or free with family membership. altavistabotanicalgardens.org/kids-in-the-garden-classes-saturday

Novo Brazil Brewing releasing a special beer for 10th anniversary: Brewmaster Guilherme Hoffmann has created a 10th-anniversary beer that will be released at Novo Brazil Brewing Company’s anniversary party on Saturday. The special release is a hazy pale ale (6% ABV), and it was made at NOVO’s Imperial Beach microbrewery. It will be available at the Otay Ranch location. The party is sports-themed with representatives from the San Diego FC, Padres, Wave FC and Aztec men’s basketball team scheduled to be in attendance. There will also be live music, bounces castles for children and giveaways. 4 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday. 2015 Birch Road Suite 1017, Chula Vista. (858) 294-3175, novobrew.com

National Pickleball Day Round Robin:  Players at all skill levels can celebrate National Pickleball Day at this local tournament. There will be food and drinks for purchase and participants will receive a swag bag. Registration required. 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday. San Diego Mission Bay Resort, 1775 East Mission Bay Drive, San Diego. $35 per participant.   missionbayresort.com/local-experiences

Star Party:  The Julian Dark Sky Network will host a star party for the Perseid meteor shower this weekend. Guests can look through telescopes and check out astronomy books and aids to help them see the shower, a crescent moon, Saturn and other stars. Arrive before 8:15 p.m. Saturday. 423 Inspiration Point Road, Julian. Free. juliandarkskynetwork.com

Free concerts at the beach: The free Moonlight Beach Concert series features a performance by Beebs and Her Money Makers from 3 to 5 p.m. Aug. 11 at Moonlight Beach, 400 B St. The opening act is School of Rock House Band from 12:45 to 1:15 p.m. Kat Hall will perform from 1:45 to 2:30 p.m. Visit encinitasca.gov.

Free Blanket Sounds Summer Concerts series: The Blanket Sounds Summer Concerts series continues from 4 to 8 p.m. Aug. 11 at Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Highway. The event features local artists, musicians and collaborators to create a “multicultural and multigenerational space that uplifts creativity.” Picnics are encouraged. Admission is free. Visit blanketsounds.org.

Hillcrest CityFest: This annual block party is part music festival, part arts and vendor fair. Visitors can find live bands and DJs as well as a wide variety of food and drink options. CityFest After Dark starts at 7 p.m. with drag performances and more DJs. There will also be a kids zone with crafts and other activities. noon to 11 p.m. Sunday. Fifth Avenue near University Avenue in Hillcrest. Free. fabuloushillcrest.com/cityfest-street-fair-music-festival

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New Yorkers are warned from the skies about impending danger from storms as city deploys drones

Severe thunderstorms with heavy rain caused widespread flooding across New York City and parts of the Tri-State area on Tuesday, according to WABC-TV.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Gone is the bullhorn. Instead, New York City emergency management officials have turned high-tech, using drones to warn residents about potential threatening weather.

With a buzzing sound in the background, a drone equipped with a loudspeaker flies over homes warning people who live in basement or ground-floor apartments about impending heavy rains.

“Be prepared to leave your location,” said the voice from the sky in footage released Tuesday by the city’s emergency management agency. “If flooding occurs, do not hesitate.”

About five teams with multiple drones each were deployed to specific neighborhoods prone to flooding. Zach Iscol, the city’s emergency management commissioner, said the messages were being relayed in multiple languages. They were expected to continue until the weather impacted the drone flights.

Flash floods have been deadly for New Yorkers living in basement apartments, which can quickly fill up in a deluge. Eleven people drowned in such homes in 2021 amid rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida.

The drones are in addition to other forms of emergency messaging, including social media, text alerts and a system that reaches more than 2,000 community-based organizations throughout the city that serve senior citizens, people with disabilities and other groups.

“You know, we live in a bubble, and we have to meet people where they are in notifications so they can be prepared,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a press briefing on Tuesday.

Adams is a self-described “tech geek” whose administration has tapped drone technology to monitor large gatherings as well as to search for sharks on beaches. Under his watch, the city’s police department also briefly toyed with using a robot to patrol the Times Square subway station, and it has sometimes deployed a robotic dog to dangerous scenes, including the Manhattan parking garage that collapsed in 2023.

This story has been updated to correct that 11 people drowned in 2021, not 2011.

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Walz Has Faced Criticism for His Response to George Floyd Protests

Some believe that Gov. Tim Walz should have deployed the Minnesota National Guard sooner when riots broke out following the police murder of George Floyd.

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By Mitch Smith

• Published Aug. 6, 2024 Updated Aug. 8, 2024

A little more than a year into Tim Walz’s first term as governor, he faced his biggest test.

His state, already in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, was suddenly in the international spotlight after a Minneapolis police officer was filmed murdering George Floyd in May 2020.

Looting, arson and violence followed, quickly overwhelming the local authorities , and some faulted Mr. Walz for not doing more and not moving faster to bring the situation under control with Minnesota National Guard troops and other state officials.

Two days after Mr. Floyd’s death, with protests in Minneapolis turning increasingly violent, the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, asked Mr. Walz to deploy the National Guard. Hours later, the city’s police chief submitted a written request for 600 troops. But it was not until the next afternoon that Mr. Walz signed an executive order allowing the Guard to assist cities.

“It was obvious to me that he froze under pressure, under a calamity, as people’s properties were being burned down,” said State Senator Warren Limmer, a Republican who helped lead a committee that investigated the response to the unrest. He suggested that Mr. Walz’s personal sympathies toward protesters might have delayed a muscular response.

Mr. Walz, a Democrat who has been chosen as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, has since defended his actions during those days, saying he and others in state government were acting in good faith amid unimaginable circumstances.

“I simply believe that we try to do the best we can ,” Mr. Walz said recently at a news conference when asked about his response to the riots.

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