Emily St. John Mandel did not set out to kill all of the humans. The book was based on a series of scenes about a band of performers that were similar to her real-life friends from dance theater school in Toronto. She pictured them performing Shakespeare in rural Canada, where she grew up, a hard but good life without many of the conveniences of modern technology.
Shakespearean actors would be sent to the woods to perform plays for tech-free towns. The hero of The Postman, a 1997 movie starring Kevin Costner, travels around doing Shakespeare for shanty-town audiences at the end of civilization, just like the hero of David Brin's 1985 novel. Both stories have optimistic visions of a world rebuilding, but they had to reverse engineer a story about how and why billions of us had died.
The mechanism Mandel chose was a real one, and it was six years after she wrote Station Eleven. The series was commissioned long before anyone uttered the words. Audiences are more aware of what's going on. We are aware of how hard it is to kill off a lot of our world with a virus. The less it can spread, the faster it kills its hosts. "The virus in Station Eleven would have killed off the entire population before it burned out," Mandel said in March 2020.
Climate change is a crisis best represented metaphorically as in Don't Look Up, because creators are running out of ways to end the world as briskly and cleanly as our apocalypse fantasies seem to demand. Mandel wanted an event that would guarantee a blank canvas, filled with the joy of everlasting art as much as the sadness of trauma. She may end up being the last writer who could do it in a believable way. Station Eleven could be the end of the world.
Brin chose nuclear war as the most likely apocalypse anyone could see in 1985; by Mandel's era, the bomb was off the table for anyone trying to suspend their disbelief. We've seen more fictional postwar worlds than you can shake a geiger counter at, and we're more aware of the ways that environment would harm us. A limited nuclear exchange could cause widespread famine and poison the atmosphere with radiation for generations to come.
The most reliable method of fictional genocide left standing in the last year was Pandemics. Mandel has used them to kill off a lot of the human race. In my March 2020 survey of the genre, I identified only four, the most famous being Stephen King's epic The Stand, in which the bio- engineered bug known as Captain Trips kills a mere 99.4 percent of humanity. Mary Shelley gave her virus seven years to kill a higher percentage of humanity in The Last Man.
Station Eleven's Georgia flu is a very fast-spreading, highly mutated virus that can kill 7 billion humans in three weeks. Mandel didn't explain how it could do that. She only spent a few chapters in the early days of the epidemic. The world collapse can be seen from the perspective of a man locked down in his brother's Chicago apartment. News anchors freak out and flee the studio and suspend our disbelief.
The first few days of Georgia flu with Frank and Javeen were remembered by Kirsten.
The Station Eleven version of the show has very little information on the Georgia flu. The show gives us very little time to think about its background apocalypse, because it jumps around in time even more than the book, and focuses even more on delightful creative distraction. One TV voice tells us that the virus explodes. If you're looking for a nightmare, you need a deadly and highly transmissible virus that can be spread quickly through air travel, so we can stop the spread of the disease before it starts to show symptoms.
One of the least believable aspects of Station Eleven is that so many people instantly trust what experts are saying. Denying has a stronger hold on the human mind than we thought. Jim, the hapless business colleague of "Station Eleven" creator Miranda, may be the most believable character in the show because when the deadly virus hits his hotel in Malaysia, he plays golf.
We have experiences with border closings and other measures that slowed the spread of COVID and its Delta and Omicron variant in some countries more than others. The show shows a group of people who were free of the virus who locked themselves in the airport. The solar-powered airport becomes home to the Museum of Civilization because of their self-imposed isolation.
Surely, there would be many more such locations that would keep essential infrastructure like electricity and the internet intact, which would boost humanity's survival rate far beyond the 0.01 percent level. The world over, communities would do the same thing that villages in Sierra Leone did to help contain the outbreak of the disease. Station Eleven would have us think that we are more resistant, more collaborative, and more willing to stay put for a good cause than we are.
Station Eleven has a great lesson to teach, that you don't need to kill 99.99 percent of humanity to create trauma. This virus has killed over 5 million people in two years, which is less than 0.1 percent of the global population, and we who lived through it will never forget it. It has not given us the blank canvas to build a new civilization. If you can't find a place in the Michigan wilderness to build your community, you'll have to go to Burning Man. You'll still have to deal with the messy, imperfect, capitalism-filled world as it is.
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