{4.5\/5} “Arthur lives in a permanent state of disorientation like a low-grade fever, the question hanging over everything being How did I get from there to here? And there are moments — at parties in Toronto, in Los Angeles, in New York — when he’ll be telling people about Delano Island and he’ll notice a certain look on their faces, interested but a little incredulous, like he’s describing an upbringing on the surface of Mars.”<\/p>\n
Station Eleven<\/strong> by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2014<\/p>\n Twenty years after an epidemic wipes out most of humanity, a company of actors and musicians tour around performing in the towns they come across. At one town they’re expecting to find a couple of friends they left there 2 years ago, one who was about to have a baby. But the town has changed — their friends were gone and a prophet was in charge. They head out to find their friends but they’re going in a direction they haven’t been before.<\/p>\n It’s about actors and artists, some living in our society and some living in a post-apocalyptic society. The plot isn’t what’s brilliant about this book — it’s the ideas, the characters, and the beautiful writing.<\/p>\n In the before-the-epidemic sections, one character is writing and drawing a graphic novel called Station Eleven<\/strong> — she was inspired by the “Spaceman Spiff” segments of Calvin and Hobbes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The actors and musicians have the phrase “Because survival is insufficient” written on one of their vehicles — the line is from Star Trek: Voyager<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I liked it a lot — it’s one of the more hopeful post-apocalyptic stories.<\/p>\n This is the first book by Mandel I’ve read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {4.5\/5} “Arthur lives in a permanent state of disorientation like a low-grade fever, the question hanging over everything being How did I get from there to here? And there are moments — at parties in Toronto, in Los Angeles, in New York — when he’ll be telling people about Delano Island and he’ll notice a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8],"class_list":["post-9842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9842"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9862,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9842\/revisions\/9862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}