Station Eleven

I like science and speculative fiction as a cloudy mirror. To recognise our present world in its themes, but only after peering through the distortion. The familiar made unrecognisable, then appears as something new.

In these, I’ve read a lot about the end-of-the-world. Here is another entry. Yet this stands out as something faintly hopeful.

The collapse here is catastrophic, more than most, an almost irrecoverable loss of humanity.

Characters here old enough to remember talk about how they knew there was no untouched corner of the world left, because there were never any planes in the sky. Not long after reading this I looked up into the evening sky and saw the ever present scribe of contrails, before starry satellites began their shift.

You’d know it wasn’t just your part of the world if all that went away one day and never came back.

The book covers transition between these worlds well. You think of the present, see yourself in our smaller crises. A familiar feel of I was worried about so many daily things, then suddenly many of them felt both irrelevant and small, compared to this.

In this newly emptied world, the book skips the lame philosophy that states if we’re stripped of our society life is nasty, brutish and short. It doesn’t shy from the difficulties, but does a good job of making you feel it’s a continuation of human relations rather than a revelation of some long repressed demons.

We follow characters who travel through this world as part of a symphony, making music and performing Shakespeare. Entirely plausibly! The last time the world was this small, weren’t there also travelling bands of mummers?

There’s something brazenly hopeful about it. This isn’t the description of people doing a bad job of re-enacting Star Wars to show what they’d lost.

This is saying that something, even art survives as a need. Through a need to do more than survive.

Lovely book.