Station Eleven

Station Eleven is a novel that prioritizes characters over plot. It's the story of the interconnection of otherwise disparate human lives in the midst of a respiratory illness that has a 99% mortality rate. Station Eleven spends half of it's time right before the pandemic, getting to know the life of characters that both do and do not live through the schism, and the other half is spent really two decades after, in a society that is still struggling to find it's footing again.

Station Eleven straddles the line between genre fiction and literary fiction. The science fiction/post-apocalyptic elements aren't really a factor in a lot of the writing, and even when they are they take a backseat to the character work. So I guess lets talk about those characters, are they any good? Yeah, they were pretty decent, though nothing earth shattering. This is a tender story and the characters are depicted tenderly. This is a world where killing is sometimes necessary to stay alive, and people carry that weight with them heavily the rest of their lives. We get detailed exploration of the fears, desires, and flaws of our main protagonists that made me genuinely care about them. The main antagonist(other than the pandemic itself), the "Prophet", doesn't get the same detailed treatment as the rest, which leaves him feeling one-dimensional by comparison.

One of my major gripes with Station Eleven is the ending. The entire book is focused on the connection that humans form through chance and coincidence, and how these connections can have massive impacts on our lives. The connections between the characters are slowly revealed over the course of the novel, leading to a final confluence that should've been immensely satisfying as world collide. Instead, none of that happens. It's a deflating finish where none of the interaction that's anticipated happens 'on screen', and you're left to assume much of it yourself. Another minor quibble of mine has more to do with my suspension of disbelief. I find it hard to believe that after twenty years children aren't being taught actually useful subjects in school. There's a weird fixation on the past, on how things used to be, and the glorification of past advancements. This would make sense for characters that survived through the pandemic, but for children that knew nothing else? For a book that's as positive as it is, I found this oddity to strike a much more pessimistic tone than was perhaps intended.

Otherwise, I found that positivity to be refreshing. There's a well worn grove in post-apocalyptic literature in terms of the tone and feeling, and it's nice to see an author treading their own path. At times Station Eleven reminded me of the 'cozy-catastrophe' novels that I've read in the past, but I think that Station Eleven optimism is more well earned. Characters dealt with and emotionally processed traumatic events, and still decided to be optimistic because "survival isn't sufficient", where as characters in those older cozy-catastrophes were more so ignoring or compartmentalizing their trauma.

There are some comparisons I saw between Station Eleven and Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. Both are character focused stories set in an alternate future with positive and tender tones that contrast the setting. I think I preferred Dreamsnake slightly, though they both fall in the same headspace for me. I don't think that I was quite as captivated by Station Eleven as it seems many are, but I don't think that's necessarily due to inherent flaws in the book.