Emily St. John Mandel on Station Eleven, Katrina, and Apocalypse Lit

Last Saturday, Virginia’s Central Rappahannock Regional Library System and the University of Mary Washington hosted Emily St. John Mandel for a discussion about her 2015 novel Station Eleven: the story of a troupe of Shakespearean actors traveling a sparsely populated North America decades following an apocalyptic pandemic. We spoke with Mandel following her presentation and signing.

Unbound Worlds: Would you consider Station Eleven to be a “cozy catastrophe”?

Emily St. John Mandel: I’ve head the term, and I don’t love it, to be honest. How cozy can a catastrophe be? Ultimately, I think that some post-apocalyptic novels are darker and more horrific than others, but how cozy can it be if it’s the end of the world? I don’t see it, personally, but I was very conscious of not wanting to write a horror novel. It seems to me that many of the post-apocalyptic novels that I’ve read are set in the madness, chaos, and horror immediately following a complete societal breakdown. That ground has been covered so well by other writers, so it was more interesting to me to write about what comes next: the new world, and the new culture, that begins to appear 15 or 20 years down the line.

UW: To what degree has our actual response to emergencies influenced you? It seems that when Katrina hit, it was our first big natural emergency to have 24-7 news coverage. Did the immediate and post-event coverage influence the book?

ESJM: I think I was influenced by Katrina. Of course, I experienced via the news other catastrophes, but that was the first one where the government didn’t come — where people were stranded for days in the Superdome. That lack of response, that total vacuum, was horrifying to see. I think that it is fair to say that it influenced the way that I think about disasters. Something like that makes you think, “What if no one ever came? What it if was more than three days? What if it was forever?” As I thought about the way those first moments would play out, the way that the media would report on this developing pandemic, which I touched upon in the sections in the airport, I was thinking about our current media culture.

UW: It had occurred to me while reading that there were some similarities between what happened at the Superdome, and what happened at the airport in Station Eleven. You were talking about technology during your presentation: what it takes from us, and what happens when it all goes away. To what extent, as a writer, have you found technology to be a necessary evil in this world? How do you handle it?

ESJM: Technology is a necessary evil. I’m deeply ambivalent, which I mean in the classical sense of the world: I’m pulled in both directions. I think it is wonderful, and I think it is awful. We are so distracted now, as a culture, and that is something that can be dangerous for writers: You have to focus on your work for long periods of time, and you need the general public to have a long enough attention span to read a novel. It is something we have to deal with, and think about. I haven’t really come to any firm proclamation about technology.

UW: I noticed that you have a Twitter account.

ESJM: I do, but you’ll also notice that I’ve tweeted something like three times in the last year. Twitter is a cesspool. That is my feeling at this point. I’m happy to go on record on that. When I first started on Twitter about 10 years ago, it was fun. You’d log on, have a conversation about books, and log off. It was like stepping into a cocktail party, talking with bookish people, and leaving.

UW: You addressed some of the reasons that apocalyptic narratives appeal to us in your presentation. One of those reasons is that the apocalyptic event can be a leveling: We’re all on the same level again — even if that’s a terrible state. I was wondering about that. Do you think that this has a particular appeal during times of great complexity?

ESJM: I think there is something about the radical simplification of the world following an apocalyptic breakdown of some kind that is appealing to people. Maybe some of the theories that I brought up — that we wish we could be more heroic people, that we could be reformed into heroes if the world were remade, the way we long to blow things up and start over, and our desires for redemption, someone in the audience brought up the battle between good and evil — may suggest that we long for a world where the lines between these things could be a little clearer. I think maybe it does all come down to some desire for simplification, and of course that all does tie back into our technology: that as much as we’ve gained from our devices, something has been lost, and maybe we do long for more simplicity in our lives, at times.

UW: Sometimes I wonder if another appeal of the apocalyptic narrative is that we can’t possibly imagine a world without us: that once I’m dead, then everyone else has to be dead, too.

ESJM: It’s really funny. Sometimes people will talk with me about that at times, and say, “How would you survive after the collapse in Station Eleven?” Well, the collapse wiped out 99 percent of the population: Why are we assuming that either of us would survive? But yes, people can’t conceive of a world without them: You’re right.

UW: You spoke about genre a little bit. You don’t want to get put into a box, as an author. At the same, time there are benefits of reaching different audiences. I write for a science fiction audience, and I was wondering what you would say if you were to speak to that audience about the book.

ESJM: I don’t think I’d say anything different from what I say to any audience. I think that, as readers, we do ourselves a disservice by being too restrictive where genre is concerned. There was a great article by Joshua Rothman on the New Yorker blog back in 2014 where he talked about genre. He said something that I think should be obvious but sometimes isn’t: A book can be more than one genre. That’s the way that I like to think about genre: Sure, it is science fiction, but it is also literary fiction. My other books were literary fiction, but also detective fiction, and crime fiction. I like the idea that a book can be more than one, because these are somewhat subjective borders that we’re drawing around literary projects.

UW: Anything else you’d like to say? Do you have a project you’re working on that you’d like to mention?

ESJM: I’m working on my next novel, tentatively titled, The Glass Hotel, but I don’t know if they’ll keep that or not. It is about the collapse of a massive Ponzi scheme in New York City during the economic collapse of 2008. I don’t have a publication date, yet, but I’m thinking probably late 2019.