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A Dazzling New Foray into Speculative Fiction From Emily St. John Mandel

In “Station Eleven,” she explored fallout from a pandemic. Now, in “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel takes up existential questions of time and being.

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station eleven book review new york times

By Laird Hunt

SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel

Let’s begin with a moment of beauty, one of many in Emily St. John Mandel’s time-leaping sixth novel, “Sea of Tranquility.” It comes in the second half of the book, which is set in part in Earth’s far-off future, as a woman takes a commercial flight back to her home on the moon:

“What it was like to leave Earth: a rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.”

That feeling of something lovely glimpsed and lost is everywhere in these pages — which makes sense considering that the exiles, grieving friends, lonely authors and lonelier time travelers Mandel sets in motion in this luminous follow-up to “ Station Eleven” and “ The Glass Hotel ” are all trying, with varying degrees of success, to catch hold of what keeps eluding them. And whether that’s something they’ve had and lost, or something they want but can’t quite name, all feel adrift on the boundless seas of longing.

The novel opens in 1912, with a solo journey from England to Canada, undertaken after an act of modest rebellion by Edwin St. John St. Andrew, scion of an aristocratic family, results in his expulsion from home. The feckless young man’s melancholy ramble comes abruptly to an end following an inexplicable vision in a Vancouver forest and a mysterious encounter with a man named Gaspery Roberts. Then a new section begins, this one set more than a century in the future, with a woman named Mirella Kessler who has just learned that her estranged friend Vincent is dead. This section, too, refers to a vision in a forest and features the same Gaspery Roberts. We eventually turn to a third section, set almost two more centuries later, featuring yet another new character, but both the vision and Roberts are there as well.

In this way, the first 100 pages of the novel introduce a group of people, each wracked by loneliness or sadness or purposelessness, but all of whom have, in some way, experienced “a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse,” “an impression of being in some vast interior,” “notes of violin music,” “then an incomprehensible sound.” And though along the way we’ve met intriguing characters like Mirella and Vincent, who some will recognize from “The Glass Hotel,” and have spent time with a 23rd-century writer, Olive Llewellyn, who is unquestionably a stand-in for Mandel herself (Olive has become tremendously famous in part for having written a book about the aftermath of a fictional flu pandemic), this is where, as they say, things get interesting. Because this is where the novel catches up to the enigmatic Roberts.

Roberts grew up on the moon in the late 24th century. When the story turns, finally, to him, it’s the dawn of the 25th, and our mystery man is at loose ends, working as a house detective at the Grand Luna Hotel. Though relocated to the high-functioning Colony One, the nostalgia-prone Roberts is haunted by his upbringing in the relatively derelict Colony Two, a.k.a. the Night City, “the place where the sky was always black,” because the failure of the protective dome’s artificial lighting system was judged too expensive to fix. His work at the hotel, where he is paid just to be present and pay attention to what happens around him, would seem like dubious preparation for any other job, but he soon takes up a new position in his brilliant sister Zoey’s shop, a most curious entity called the Time Institute. At this point, there have already been hints about where and when his unusual new job will take him, but the why of his journey — an investigation into the anomalous vision, which may have alarming implications about the nature of reality — has yet to be unfurled.

Mandel has worked adroitly with multiple timelines in her previous books, leaping back and forth between the past, present and future to explore killer viruses and Madoff-inspired Ponzi schemes. Her characters, too, have frequently felt temporally discombobulated. In “The Glass Hotel,” for example, a key player, the above-mentioned Vincent, says, “I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on, and it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next.” She also says, more plainly, “I am out of time.”

In ‘Sea of Tranquility,’ Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.

In “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandell makes that metaphor — feeling out of sync — quite literal and uses a machine to send Roberts and others out on missions across time. The 20th, 21st, 23rd and 25th centuries are all visited here with plenty of now-familiar, pop-culture concern about temporal health expressed along the way.

If this were a different sort of novel, it might be reasonable to fret that stories like Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound of Thunder,” novels like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” television shows like “Dr. Who,” certain episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or even Disney’s recent madcap “Loki,” had done time travel stories better, or at least earlier, and in most cases with more elaborately imagined tech. But Mandel is interested in something other than limning the highs and lows of timeline trotting and figuring out what to do — it’s never good, is it? — when someone like Roberts steps off the path, as he eventually does, to try to help someone in the past. Indeed, though the speculative elements in “Sea of Tranquility” (which was written during the Covid-19 pandemic and discusses the crushing impact of pandemics more broadly) are set in service of an attempt to make some sense of huge societal and existential crises and pose good old questions like what does it mean to be alive, Mandel’s novel has more in common with tech-minimized sci-fi outings like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.”

In “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and her ability to project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart. As in Ishiguro, this is not born of some cheap, made-for-television, faux-emotional gimmick or mechanism, but of empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this “green-and-blue world” and who one day might live well beyond.

It is that aspect of “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel’s finely rendered, characteristically understated descriptions of the old-growth forests her characters walk through, the domed moon colonies some of them call home, the robot-tended fields they gaze over or the whooshing airship liftoff sound they hear even in their dreams, that will, for this reader at least, linger longest. One can only hope that the “Far Colonies” Mandel evokes but never really explores in “Sea of Tranquility” will figure, along with Gaspery Roberts or one or two of his fellows, in a future work.

Laird Hunt’s most recent novel, “Zorrie,” was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for fiction.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY By Emily St. John Mandel 255 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

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STATION ELEVEN

by Emily St. John Mandel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2014

Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.

Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.

In her fourth novel, Mandel ( The Lola Quartet , 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear , his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014

LITERARY FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | APOCALYPTIC & POST APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI

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by Emily St. John Mandel

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BOOK TO SCREEN

Station Eleven Miniseries to Star Mackenzie Davis

HBO Max Wins Film Rights to Lyla Lee YA Novel

SEEN & HEARD

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

From the remembrance of earth's past series , vol. 1.

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014

Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.

Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.

In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

SCIENCE FICTION

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In “Station Eleven,” All Art Is Adaptation

By Katy Waldman

Illustration of a theater stage overgrown

“Station Eleven,” Emily St. John Mandel’s hit novel, from 2014, is the kind of book you gulp down in a sitting. I recently reread it in an afternoon; my partner devoured it on two short flights and a layover. The book inspires the sort of voraciousness that it ascribes to its virus, which blazes around the globe in a matter of days, killing ninety-nine per cent of the people in its path. The story’s main action takes place twenty years later, in the “After,” where a fierce young woman named Kirsten tours with a band of Shakespearean players, encountering agrarian communes and violent cults, keeping the flame of art alive. That time line has a clear, tight shape—it builds to a climactic confrontation and the resolution of a mystery—but Mandel splices it with flashbacks to the “Before,” our familiar, dazzling chaos of electricity, cars, and cell phones. There, the seductive figure of Arthur Leander, a playboy actor who dies onstage of a heart attack, bridges far-flung character arcs. We meet his ex-wife Miranda, whose pensive comic book about a stranded astronaut, “Station Eleven,” falls into Kirsten’s hands; Jeevan, an aspiring E.M.T.; and Leander’s second ex-wife, Elizabeth, and son, Tyler.

It’s not always easy to pinpoint what makes a book “unputdownable,” what gives it the feverishly consuming quality that “ Station Eleven ” has. (Although COVID -19 adds fangs to the premise, the novel was wildly popular before the pandemic.) But some of the book’s swiftness derives from its consistency—from a tone that never changes or breaks, slipping through your body like a pure, bright beam. For all their disparate circumstances, Mandel’s characters can evoke variations on a single person: wistful and dreamy, with a competent, vigorous exterior; invested in values such as beauty and goodness; and working to surmount their flaws. The over-all impression is of an author less interested in individuals than in manifesting a minor-key mood coupled with a hopeful, humanist vision.

“ Station Eleven ,” the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Where the book felt stylized, more like poetry or a fable, the series embraces the messiness, range, and complexity of life as real people live it. One doesn’t binge it; ideally one watches its ten episodes slowly, more than once. And it differentiates the novel’s characters, allowing them to summon a wider breadth of experience. On a superficial level, Miranda is now a Black woman with roots in the Caribbean. Arthur was born in Mexico, not British Columbia, and is also more than simply charming; he exudes a sly, almost dangerous sweetness. Jeevan (a soulful Himesh Patel) becomes a freelance culture critic—“I don’t have a job,” he clarifies—who, rather than surge into action during Arthur’s heart attack, can only stand by helplessly. He adopts a girl—an eight-year-old Kirsten—whose parents have disappeared with the onset of the virus, and one of the show’s time lines follows him, the child, and Jeevan’s brother Frank as they hole up in Frank’s apartment tower to wait out the apocalypse.

The show takes one particularly smart liberty with its source material, rethinking art, what it does, and why it matters. Mandel infuses her novel with traditional aestheticism. A wagon in Kirsten’s troupe, the Traveling Symphony, bears a slogan cribbed from “Star Trek”: “Survival is insufficient.” The book’s pandemic survivors are desperate for music, poetry, and performance, and they hunger for scraps of text, even from a brooding comic about space travel. (Onscreen, Jeevan is allowed to wail that the titular cartoon is “so pretentious!”—an opinion that would upend Mandel’s delicately reverent atmosphere.) For post-pandemic audiences, the purest, strongest drugs are Beethoven and the Bard. As one member of the Symphony says, “People want what was best about the world.”

Art may be the world’s premium product, but, for Mandel, it is also not entirely of the world. Its unearthly qualities are represented in part by the spaceman of Miranda’s comic. Here, the novel draws on the old, melancholy notion of art as a beautiful lie. According to the book’s organizing metaphor, “Before” was all theatre, lights, and fantasy; “After” is like waking up, as a planet, from a discombobulating dream. It’s no accident that Arthur’s death ushers in the new order. He is a mascot of pre-pandemic civilization: wealthy, famous, and magnetic, but too entranced by trifles. After the flu hits, humans lose the protection of political institutions, and suffer waves of looting and extremism, but they eventually reconstitute themselves in agrarian coöperatives. They no longer care about impressing one another at dinner parties; they crave “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Symphony forms to recapture glimmers of what was lost. In the book’s careful balance, the old dispensation’s ruin is offset by what these characters have gained—and yet an air of romantic nostalgia, of mourning, prevails.

In short, the book is of a piece with an Arcadian literary tradition that laments the end of paradise but holds up knowledge as a consolation. The adaptation, created by Patrick Somerville, rejects much of this pastoralism. Indeed, Somerville’s attitude toward art seems almost practical by comparison. His texts have a specific purpose: they serve as trapdoors into the subjectivities of the living and the dead. Art matters to the world of this “Station Eleven” not just because it strengthens the social fabric—it’s an experience people can share—but because it notates and preserves the luminously erratic lives that the show itself is at great pains to capture. Miranda’s literary achievement, in her comic, proves secondary to the miraculous way in which it responds to characters’ particular emotions and conflicts. Why do we need art when the world has ended? Because, Somerville answers, it encodes the vivid presence of everyone who’s gone.

A lesser show might make a bolder claim. It might, for instance, reduce Mandel’s aestheticism to grandiose platitudes about how art can save us. But the fact that survival isn’t sufficient does not mean that art is . In both versions of “Station Eleven,” beauty’s power over death is provisional and fleeting; on the show, it’s not even close. While staying in Frank’s aerie in Chicago, the eight-year-old Kirsten directs the brothers in a reënactment of a scene from her comic book. The performance is meant to distract the trio from looming loss; with food supplies dwindling, Jeevan wants to leave the tower, and Frank wants to stay. That they decide to postpone “real life” for art’s sake, for the play, accelerates disaster—an intruder has time to burst in—and yet the scene, in which the comic’s protagonist, Doctor Eleven, bids farewell to his mentor, is also a consecration. Without it, the brothers wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye to one another. Speaking as characters, they become most completely themselves.

Twenty years later, Kirsten’s worn copy of “Station Eleven” has become talismanic to her. Lines from the text reverberate through the show—“I remember damage,” “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.” The cartoon binds Kirsten to a man known only, at first, as the Prophet. Played by Daniel Zovatto, he’s unnervingly soft-voiced and serene, like someone whose pain has alienated him from feeling. He seems to know the words of “Station Eleven” by heart, but his reading of it discards the theme of memory. In fact, he has crafted a youth movement around one particular snippet: “There is no before.”

The book withholds the Prophet’s identity until its last act, contributing to its elegant velocity. Somerville, though, unknots the enigma (spoiler: the Prophet is Tyler, Arthur Leander’s son) almost as soon as the character is introduced. In the novel, Tyler is familiar with “Station Eleven,” the comic written by his father’s former wife, but more enthralled by the Bible, with its doomsday imagery and insistence that everything happens for a reason. A straightforward villain, he incarnates the deceptive uses of fiction, the narcotic power of too-tidy explanations. The show, in turning him into a “Station Eleven” superfan, dims the focus on how art can lead people astray. Now the crucial fact seems to be that two fervent readers, Tyler and Kirsten, are interpreting the same text differently.

The shift is telling. HBO’s “Station Eleven” is obsessed with adaptation, the way that people (many of them actors) reuse and project upon a source. It’s awash in references: Christmas carols, the funk band Parliament, Bob Dylan, “King Lear” and “Hamlet.” There’s also the most transcendent cover of rap music that I’ve ever seen on TV, a set piece that somehow crystallizes a character, a situation, and the human situation, all at once. Most of the art featured on the series doesn’t exist in its original form. It comes filtered through individuals, who carry and change it in time—shaping, recontextualizing, extracting what they need. One feels as though Somerville were triangulating between the texts and his characters to locate some mysterious quality that hovers in the middle. When Kirsten, Jeevan, and Frank stage “Station Eleven,” for example, the play works because the actors and the dynamics among them are so real. Yet the players grow more alive in the performance; their actual dynamics are heightened by it.

In reconsidering what makes art valuable, Somerville does not so much dispute Mandel’s judgments about the past (shining and false) and the future (real and hard) as collapse them. Episodes alternate between the current adventures of the Symphony and the immediate aftermath of the flu, as well as passages from the protagonists’ more distant histories. These melded chronologies seem to insist on the simultaneity of life and memory, just as they evoke the blur of fact and fantasy. Characters’ experiences, like their fictions, become indelible and living parts of them. At one point, Kirsten-as-Hamlet recites a monologue about bereavement while her eight-year-old self is shown discovering that her parents are dead. Later, she hallucinates that she has returned as an adult to Frank’s high-rise, where she watches, again, the ghostly play.

If, in the book, “survival is insufficient” sets up a comparison between life and art, the series suggests—in a limited but real sense—that they’re one and the same. Throughout the show, there’s a thousand-yard P.O.V. shot that intrudes in moments of death or transformation. It’s meant to evoke the perspective of Doctor Eleven, tranquilly observing from space, but it could easily belong to a past or future version of any of the characters, or to a chorus of the flu dead. Early in the novel, after Jeevan tries and fails to revive Arthur, he looks up at the theatre’s “cavernous” emptiness: “fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected.” But, in the adaptation of this moment, the perspective is reversed. Instead of peering through Jeevan’s eyes, the camera stays on him while soaring higher and higher. The human body shrinks as the show’s vantage fuses with that of the departed soul. It’s as if art’s job is to let no one go undetected—to provide the audience that most people, real or imaginary or absent, would be lucky to deserve.

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'Station Eleven' imagines a strangely humane human apocalypse

Glen Weldon

Jeevan (Himesh Patel) takes Kristen (Matilda Lawler) under his wing as a virus ravages humanity in HBO Max's Station Eleven. Ian Watson/HBO Max hide caption

Jeevan (Himesh Patel) takes Kristen (Matilda Lawler) under his wing as a virus ravages humanity in HBO Max's Station Eleven.

Your personal threshold for pandemic fiction, at this stage in our ongoing global kaleidoscopic bacchanalia of doom, may have dropped precipitously since the post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven became a sensation in 2014. If so, you may consider the prospect of sitting down to watch a viral pandemic wipe out most of humanity over the course of ten hourlong episodes on HBO Max to be akin to that of attending an immersively tactile theatrical experience called Root Canal: The Musical.

The good news — and it turns out to be very, very good — is the team that adapted Emily St. John Mandel's novel evidently agrees with you. In bringing the novel to the small screen, they have assiduously rounded off its sharper, more despairing edges, and amplified its moments of humor, its small but deeply felt instances of connection and humanity.

Again and again, the series presents situations where its characters could make the kind of shocking, violent, nihilistic choices that characters make so routinely on performatively bleak shows like The Walking Dead . Yet again and again, they — and the series itself — instead choose the more humane, more profound, more hopeful option.

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Smartly, the series chops up the chronology, so we actually spend relatively little time amidst the viral outbreak itself, with all of its by now chillingly familiar business: denial, growing concern, more denial, masks, news bulletins, panic, paranoia, still more denial, etc. (The writers are to be commended for not falling back on the narrative crutch of using television reports as a kind of Greek chorus; most of the information we and the characters get about the crisis comes in the form of interpersonal communication — worried texts, frantic phone calls, resigned conversations.)

Consider the case of Jeevan (a soulful, effective Himesh Patel). He's just a guy attending a production of King Lear in Chicago when the lead (Gael Garcia Bernal) collapses onstage. In the chaos that follows, he — very reluctantly — agrees to help Kristen (Matilda Lawler), one of the production's child actors, find her missing parents. They find what they believe to be temporary refuge with his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan) in his apartment, until things blow over.

Things ... do not blow over.

Another thread of the story takes place in a small regional airport, to which several strangers have their planes diverted as civilization crumbles. Their attempt to build a civilization of their own, led by an avuncular Irishman (David Wilmot), a former actress (Caitlin FitzGerald) and a security guard (Milton Barnes), provides some of the series' lighter moments ... and one of its darkest.

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Mostly, though, the main thrust of the story takes place 20 years after the virus, in a world overgrown with plant life and devoid of electricity. It follows a troupe of Shakespearean actors who travel a circuit around the Great Lakes, stopping at the few remaining outposts to perform plays and music.

On the surface, the notion of a Shakespearean troupe using old plays to hold onto civilization might seem too simplistic, too overdetermined. In the book, it often does. But here it's brought to life with such empathy, such fumbling, all-too-human earnestness, that it seems like it has the power to single-handedly save humanity from itself.

The troupe's lead actress, played by a steely-eyed Mackenzie Davis, has connections to characters in the series' other plot threads. Gradually, the troupe becomes aware of a growing threat from a mysterious figure known only as The Prophet (Daniel Zovatto), who lures children into the wilderness with sinister intent.

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All of this is lifted straight from the book, as is the element that ties the story's disparate threads together: a self-published comic book called Station Eleven whose tale of existential isolation and alienation resonates deeply with various characters.

Precisely how these characters interact — how they split apart, reconnect and meet their ultimate fates — has been greatly altered in many cases. The stakes remain impossibly high, the story uniquely compelling, but the net effect is to find this chronicle of a shattered, scattered human civilization strangely comforting, even hopeful.

It's performances like Patel's and Davis' that drive the series' abiding sense of empathy home. Patel's character Jeevan, in particular, is forever overmatched by his circumstances, whether it's caring for a young child he just met or helping to deliver a baby in an abandoned big box store. Watch his searching, wounded expression shift slightly, whenever his default state of helplessness flares into a brief sense of resolve, and then sinks back into passivity. The historical moment he's living through isn't the one he was made for. But still he tries.

That, ultimately, may be the true reason this tale of viral pandemic, mass death and the crumbling of institutions proves such a strangely heartening comfort. Like Jeevan, the moment we find ourselves in isn't the one any of us were made for.

‘Station Eleven’ made major changes from the book. The series creator explains why

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The first minutes of “Station Eleven” take place during a stage play. When an actor suddenly pauses his lines and collapses, Jeevan, played by Himesh Patel, jumps up from his seat and rushes onstage to help. “He’s having a heart attack,” he says.

This scene is also the opening of the book on which the HBO Max series is based. In the 2014 bestseller, Jeevan is introduced as a paramedic-in-training, which is why he’s able to recognize the symptoms and begin CPR. On-screen, however, Jeevan hasn’t yet made such a career change; instead, he calls out for a doctor while looking down helplessly at the collapsed actor.

It’s a small but significant tweak, says series creator Patrick Somerville. “He’s this guy who wants to help others but is not equipped to. To help the audience be present for his journey right along with him, it made a lot more sense that his dream of becoming a healer began in a moment that we get to watch ourselves, not something that happened weeks ago that we have to tell you about in some expository scene later.”

On-screen and on the page, “Station Eleven” sprawls across numerous timelines before, during and after a devastating pandemic that nearly wipes out humanity. A finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, the book has sold more than a million copies and has been translated into 33 languages. It remained a hot buy as COVID-19 spread throughout the world , even as its author, Emily St. John Mandel, told The Times in March 2020 : “I would not recommend reading ‘Station Eleven’ in the middle of a pandemic.”

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Tweaks are inevitable in any spine-to-screen adaptation, and this 10-episode series “departs significantly [from the book] in details, events, characters and characterizations,” writes Times critic Robert Lloyd, who has also deemed it one of the best shows of the year . “It jumps between periods to build out character relations and motivations, and to plant the seeds of coincidence that will flower into closure.”

Somerville got Mandel’s blessing on the adaptation’s key changes, as the series was created without her involvement. “I think we both agreed that it’ll be healthy and make more sense for both our lives and the creative process to wall it off,” Somerville says of meeting with Mandel.

A man and a young girl at a store checkout counter.

“As a novelist who is also a TV writer, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen bad s— happen to books I love,” he adds. “A lot of times, producers think you can just do a one-to-one mapping of a novel into a script, and you just can’t. I love the book so much and wanted to do it justice, and I really loved the idea of adaptation being done at a high level in order to protect something of value.”

Throughout the process, the creative team prioritized expectations from the wide “Station Eleven” readership. “The bar is incredibly high, not just in casting and storytelling but also in the details: How do you make these things, which someone just wrote from her imagination, functional and real on-screen?” says executive producer Jessica Rhoades. “Authors everywhere create things, but you actually don’t have to make choices about what they look like. We had to make these decisions knowing that the audience who loves the book is waiting to see what we chose.”

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The changes are evident throughout the first three episodes, now streaming on HBO Max. For example, much of the action takes place in Chicago, where Somerville lived for nine years, rather than Mandel’s native Toronto, because “the architecture of that town speaks to the specificity of the places in Episode 1.” (Ironically, after all productions were paused because of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Station Eleven” was able to resume filming — in Toronto.)

Readers may be taken aback by the series’ pairing of Jeevan with Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), a child actor in the aforementioned play who is unable to reunite with her parents, for numerous foundational scenes. “In the book, the experience of the chaos from the pandemic is all internal and independent, but telling a story that way on TV is not very interesting,” says Somerville.

“We also needed the show to be funny sometimes — not to be glib about tragedies but more to get the tone we needed to make people feel safe — and it’s an absolutely comic setup to have two people who don’t know each other well, or have different ideas about what’s right and wrong, have to work together to get somewhere.”

A woman in a blue outfit sits at a table.

Additionally, the third episode details a backstory and a thriller-like fate for Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), the creator of the fictional graphic novel from which Mandel’s novel, and the HBO Max series, take their name. All of it was invented specifically for the screen.

“We started from scratch with Miranda in terms of where she came from and how that graphic novel is incredibly grounded in her character,” Somerville says of the comic that shares the title of the series. “We wanted to show the life of an artist and not do it in an eye-roll way. In the end, to us, she feels like a real person.”

What’s on-screen is what Rhoades considers “the truest form of adaptation,” she says. “When you tell someone about a book you’re reading, you don’t really tell them what it’s about plot-wise; you tell them how it makes you feel, what you love about it and what it makes you think about and how it makes you reflect on your own life. I think the same is true about the series, in that it makes you feel everything you feel when reading the book.”

That feeling is one of unlikely and yet undeniable hope that comes from a shared artistic experience, whether it be reading a book, watching a TV show or anything else. “I hope people take comfort in turning to art to get through things, as we have throughout this pandemic,” says Rhoades. “Whatever is the thing that makes you comfortable and safe and connects you to other people is the thing that matters.”

‘Station Eleven’

Where: HBO Max When: Anytime Rated: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under age 17)

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Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute and Poynter’s Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others. She is currently working remotely alongside her dog, Oliver.

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HBO Just Released the Spiritual Successor to The Leftovers

The beautiful station eleven changes the post-apocalyptic novel on which it’s based, often for the better..

There’s a delightful scene in the otherwise justly forgotten 2002 post-apocalyptic movie Reign of Fire , in which a group of burlap-clad peasant children watch spellbound as two men perform a dramatic sword fight on a candlelit stage. Only toward the end of this medieval-looking diversion does it become clear that the adults are acting out the famous scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which Darth Vader informs Luke Skywalker just how closely the two of them are related. Even in a world laid waste by fire-breathing dragons (yes, dragons), it seems, some stories are immortal.

This is essentially the premise of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven , in which a troupe of roaming players perform Shakespeare to a series of little settlements established in the aftermath of a highly lethal global pandemic. The new HBO 10-episode limited series based on the novel may believe in immortal stories, but it makes so many changes to Mandel’s novel that it probably doesn’t count Station Eleven among them. Both novel and series are less survivalist action-adventure than ruminations on what makes human lives meaningful, what we’d choose to save when losing everything. But their answers are not the same.

The flu that rips through the world in Station Eleven has only a 1 percent survival rate, so after it strikes, infecting and killing its victims within a few days, it burns itself out, leaving behind a handful of people who managed to isolate themselves in time. All of the central characters in the story are linked to Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal), a movie star who dies of a heart attack onstage in Chicago while playing King Lear, just before the pandemic starts. Sizable chunks of the timeline-hopping story describe life “before” and just after the flu strikes.

One character, Arthur’s first wife, Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), is a shipping industry executive who works on a graphic novel about a lonesome spaceman called Captain Eleven in her spare time. Another, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), is a child actor from the Lear production who remembers Arthur’s kindness and cherishes the copy of Miranda’s self-published book that he gave her. After Arthur dies, an audience member, Jeevan (Himesh Patel), tries to help 8-year-old Kirsten get home from the theater. When her parents turn out to be unreachable and probably dead, Kirsten joins Jeevan and his disabled brother (Nabhaan Rizwan) in a high-rise condo, where they hole up with hoarded supplies for the first months of the pandemic’s aftermath. In yet another storyline, Arthur’s best friend, Clark (David Wilmot), and second wife (Caitlin FitzGerald) get stranded in a small airport where a few dozen of the uninfected must form a new community. There, Elizabeth and Arthur’s son, like Kirsten, spends much of his time reading and rereading Miranda’s comics.

Other parts of the story take place 20 years or so after the pandemic. There’s no electricity or running water and all fuel reserves have been exhausted, so the Traveling Symphony (which also features a small orchestra) has to rely on horses to pull their wagons from town to town. The intervening years have been harrowing, and the now-grown Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) has become a whiz at throwing hunting knives at potential attackers, but a tentative peace has settled over the land. To emphasize how fragile it is, the series provides a clever visual aid, a painted wooden map with Lake Michigan at its center. The map can be rotated to follow the circular route of the Symphony, outlined around the lake’s circumference. “We don’t go off the wheel,” the players explain to a new member, because the world outside the wheel isn’t safe.

It’s worth pointing out that neither the novel nor the TV adaptation of Station Eleven offers a plausible post-apocalyptic scenario. Mandel has survivors killing one another over backpacks in a world where there are far more backpacks (and pretty much every other material resource) than the remaining residents will ever need. The symphony is impractically large for a troupe that apparently survives off of the largess of the tiny encampments that actually grow fresh food. (We are never told or shown how or if the symphony gets paid.) Miranda’s comic seems to be the only book anyone ever reads—even those survivors camped out in the airport terminal, which ought to be rich in Nora Roberts and Liane Moriarty paperbacks. Last but not least, Captain Eleven is no Luke Skywalker. From what we’re told of the comic, it seems remarkably short on action, its characters spending all their time musing over the past and intoning Beckett-esque lines like “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.” This does not strike me as catnip for the 8-year-old imagination. When, in extremis, an exasperated Jeevan flips through Kirsten’s copy of the book and moans, “It’s so pretentious ,” the series earned its only laugh from me.

Showrunner Patrick Somerville and other writers who worked on the series are alumni of The Leftovers , an HBO series which might have provoked a similar cry from Jeevan. Like The Leftovers, this version of Station Eleven is melancholy, enigmatic, character-driven, and ravishing. The end of the world is exquisitely photographed, whether it’s images of a theater or hotel room segueing into the same place, years later, taken over by grass, ferns, and animals, or the eerily vast, dim, low-ceilinged spaces of a chain department store that’s been converted into a post-apocalyptic birthing center. In the early episodes of the series, the stark beauty of the ruined world the characters inhabit is fully capable of carrying the show, but it doesn’t need to. Strong performances all around, particularly from Lawler as the child Kirsten, and scripts grounded in the characters’ relationships make every episode indelible.

Things start to disintegrate toward the end, unfortunately. The series creators have seen fit to make major alterations to Mandel’s plot, some astute, others simply confusing. Jeevan and Kirsten meet only glancingly in the novel. The series makes the inspired move of having him save her and become her surrogate parent until they are unwillingly separated. The terror of this sudden responsibility for another life transforms Jeevan and produces some of the series’ best writing and acting. In a less successful change, the novel’s main antagonist, a self-styled prophet running a local cult, has been transformed into a more ambiguous figure. His motives make no sense until you realize that the series, in search of more drama than Mandel’s novel can supply, is setting up a performance of Hamlet in the airport as a climactic moment.

There’s usually an element of wish fulfillment in any post-apocalyptic narrative. In Mandel’s novel, Arthur is an artist corrupted by celebrity culture, wealth, and a decadent abundance of choice that makes him incapable of fully committing to any woman as well as neglectful of his son. By contrast, the members of the Traveling Symphony are pure and, more important, so are their audiences, who have mysteriously lost their appetite for pop culture and clamor for the Bard. Miranda’s comic—perhaps the purest artistic work in the story, because it is made with no audience in mind besides its own creator—may come in a genre package, but it is as sedate, mournful, and brooding as any work of literary fiction. Just as Jeevan, a former paparazzo, redeems himself by becoming a doctor after the pandemic, audiences who used to clamor for trash, having been taught what really matters by catastrophe and hardship, have corrected their taste.

Some of this theme gets picked up by the creators of the Station Eleven series, but cinematic depictions of the importance of art can be hard to pull off without the result coming across as annoyingly self-important. On the page, the Traveling Symphony is suffused with Arcadian romance; on the screen, they’re show-offy theater hippies. The series seems oddly unconcerned with portraying the enduring power of Shakespeare’s work, but then what writer wants to fill his screenplay with testimonials to another, long-dead writer with whom he can never hope to compete? Among the many changes the series makes to the novel is the introduction of a mantra, repeated by the prophet: “There’s no before.” In contrast to Clark, who assembles a “museum of civilization” in the former air traffic controllers’ tower featuring displays of defunct technology, the prophet wants to erase the memory of “before” and start anew, with followers who were born after the pandemic.

The notion that the survivors must exorcise the past that haunts them appears to be one the series itself endorses. Along with the prophet—who harbors some unresolved grievances of his own—the other characters have to stop looking backward if they want to do more than just survive. This idea has, obviously, plenty of resonance for viewers currently working out our own complicated, yearning relationship to “before.” But it’s a counterintuitive message to draw from Mandel’s novel, a book in which all of the culture of significance belongs to “before,” and in which only death on an incomprehensible scale and a hardscrabble life can persuade the rude public to appreciate serious, quality art. As for the viewers of this world, whose sufferings have yet to match those of the characters of Station Eleven, a few will surely appreciate this moody, beautiful, and moving, if muddled, adaptation. The rest will probably still prefer The Walking Dead.

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Among the 1% left … Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven.

Station Eleven review – a beautiful vision of a plague-ravaged planet

What would make life still worth living after the collapse of civilisation? This adaptation of the astonishingly prescient 2014 bestseller is deeply unsettling, even in the bits it gets wrong

H ow deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. I read Emily St John Mandel’s bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. Now the television adaptation by Patrick Somerville (known for Maniac and The Leftovers) for HBO, streaming in the UK on Starzplay, is here and … resonating.

Or at least part of it is. There are – as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas – two timelines. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. Different episodes concentrate on the experiences of different characters, but the through line is young Kirsten (an absolutely extraordinary performance from 13-year-old Matilda Lawler in her first substantial role), a child actor who is abandoned by her chaperone when a stage performance of King Lear is chaotically truncated by the death of the lead, Arthur (Gael García Bernal).

Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. Though “their” plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone.

It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. Ah, you say – no. It wasn’t like that.

The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays – Hamlet, when we meet them – to the scattered plague survivors. Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. Now I am more so, but beyond the practical, the questions posed by the book and the show about how much of a refuge art can provide, what we should work to preserve, what makes a civilisation and what, ultimately, makes life worth living, remain interesting ones.

Station Eleven is a slow burn. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. Having established its Serious Credentials, it gains confidence and begins to move away from the elegiac tone that threatens to overwhelm it. Backstories are filled in – notably of Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthur’s lover and the author of the graphic novel (called Station Eleven, but don’t let the meta-ness put you off) that has been Kirsten’s lifeline over her 20 years of post-apocalyptic wandering. Lighter moments leaven the darkness, particularly when the irreducibly charismatic and off-kilter Lori Petty, as the troupe’s composer Sarah, is on screen, or when we flash back to pre-pandemic times. “You seem to get reborn almost every time you leave the house,” says Arthur’s best friend, Clark (David Wilmot, another mesmerising turn), after listening to a California female actor be an excessively California female actor over dinner for too long.

Villainry arrives (via the most frightening performance I’ve ever seen, from Daniel Zovatto as the stranger who insists on joining the Traveling Symphony “otherwise your friends are going to start to disappear”), along with the secret community known as the Museum of Civilisation. Further threads arise from the stories of other settlements – one led by Clark and the female actor (Elizabeth, played by Caitlin FitzGerald, who ended up marrying Arthur after an affair they began while he was with Miranda) – and begin to be woven together. We start to plumb the depths of Kirsten’s soul, forged by suffering, saved by the Symphony and ready to save it, too, by any means necessary. We begin, really, to care, to wonder, to ask more questions. To take refuge in the art, dammit.

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EW book review: Station Eleven , by Emily St. John Mandel

Karen is a Senior Writer for EW

Perhaps the very idea of another postapocalyptic tale exhausts you, but do stay, linger for a bit. Emily St. John Mandel’s tender and lovely new novel, Station Eleven , indeed begins when the world as we know it ends. Mandel anchors her book with the collapse of aging Hollywood actor Arthur Leander, who suffers a heart attack during a production of King Lear . As colleagues gather to raise a glass in the man’s honor, the author delivers a great slap of dread: ”Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

Within weeks, the Georgia flu, an insidiously efficient virus born in Eastern Europe and blown across the globe like a poisonous kiss, has wiped out 99 percent of the population. Mandel devotes an excruciatingly forlorn seven paragraphs to humanity’s ”incomplete list” of loss: no more cities, no more flight, no more police, no more electric guitars, no more social media. It’s what remains of a broken world that fuels a novel that miraculously reads like equal parts page-turner and poem.

One of her great feats is that the story feels spun rather than plotted, with seamless shifts in time and characters. Here, a young Arthur’s fateful meeting with his first wife. Then, a Michigan airport where stranded passengers cluster in huddles of horror beneath screens showing CNN. Now, a resolute band of actors whose caravan roams between dystopian settlements performing Shakespeare and Beethoven. ”Because survival is insufficient,” reads a line taken from Star Trek spray-painted on the Traveling Symphony’s lead wagon. The genius of Mandel’s fourth novel—the first with the marketing muscle of a major publisher—is that she lives up to those words. This is not a story of crisis and survival. It’s one of art and family and memory and community and the awful courage it takes to look upon the world with fresh and hopeful eyes. A

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If You Can Bear It, ‘Station Eleven’ Is Exactly What We Need Right Now

Chronicling the lead-up, onset, and aftermath of a virus that decimates 99 percent of the human population, the insightful HBO series is worth the cost to, in a sense, relive the past two years

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In the miniseries Station Eleven —and before it, the novel Station Eleven , written by Emily St. John Mandel and published in 2014—there exists a graphic novel, also called Station Eleven. Only five copies were ever printed, but through a series of coincidences, two make their way into the hands of children who survive a catastrophic flu and then grow up in its aftermath. As adults, the kids have entirely different takeaways from their mutual influence, the saga of a lonely astronaut marooned on a space station. One takes it as a lesson in the enduring power of art to anchor us through trying times. The other rejects civilization and its trappings altogether, becoming an isolated explorer of his own.

Station Eleven , the show, will likely earn the same polarized reaction as Station Eleven , the book-within-the-show. Faced with a story about a pandemic that sweeps the globe and ends life as we know it, some will understandably balk at the prospect of reliving the last two years. Others will forge ahead—if not enticed by the premise, then at least intrigued by the possibility a fictional apocalypse can shed light on our current reality.

I was in the latter camp when I read Station Eleven in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. After watching all 10 episodes of the masterful adaptation, now streaming its first three episodes on HBO Max, I remain in it now. As tough a sell as Station Eleven ’s synopsis may be, the show is well worth the discomfort it costs to watch characters in denial of what’s to come, then scrambling to adjust once they accept the inevitable. Created by Patrick Somerville and initially directed by Atlanta ’s Hiro Murai, Station Eleven is in some ways bigger than our present moment, using a virus with a 99 percent fatality rate to explore themes like trauma, collective memory, storytelling, and survival. It’s also inexorably tied to said moment, a fact it doesn’t try to deny and even employs to its advantage. Station Eleven is either the last thing we need right now or exactly what we need, a Rorschach test of a show that will hopefully find its ideal audience—just like the illustrated Station Eleven.

After working on the star-studded Maniac and delightfully perverse Made for Love, Somerville has developed something of a specialty for off-kilter adaptations in the realm of science fiction. But the most relevant item on his CV may be The Leftovers , another drama with a surprisingly playful approach to the end of the world. Like The Leftovers , Station Eleven understands that human nature perseveres even when human civilization does not, and that it’s human nature to crack jokes and make dumb, irrational decisions under the same circumstances that force you to get really good at throwing knives. If there’s one selling point I can offer to assuage those burnt out from compulsively checking case counts as omicron looms, it’s this: Station Eleven isn’t some foreboding slog that fries your synapses with nonstop dread. Terror is just one element in a tonal mix as eclectic as the soundtrack, which bounces from rap to rock to a synth-laden score with ease.

It isn’t easy to summarize Station Eleven , which zigzags through time from the lead-up to the flu to its onset to what comes after it’s decimated the population. Ironically, that’s also what makes the book so well-suited to adaptation as an episodic series, with many installments focusing on a particular character or point in time rather than trying to wrestle it all into a single, coherent through line. But the series and the novel share the same starting point, a scene that forecasts the story’s ambitions and themes: On the opening night of a staging of King Lear , a famous actor named Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal) suffers a heart attack. An audience member named Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) rushes to help him on stage—it’s not the last time he’ll offer help he isn’t fully qualified to give, or that Shakespeare will play an outsized role in the lives of the show’s characters.

Arthur’s costar in the King Lear production, in the role of young Goneril, is a child actor named Kirsten (Matilda Lawler). In the chaos following Arthur’s collapse, Kirsten ends up in the care of Jeevan just as the flu is rapidly spreading across Chicago. Together, they hole up with Jeevan’s agoraphobic brother in a downtown high rise to ride out the first ugly months. To distract herself, Kirsten fixates on the graphic novel given to her by Arthur’s ex-wife, a prickly artist named Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler). Years before, Miranda’s dedication to her magnum opus had opened a rift between her and her attention-hungry husband, who then remarried his costar Elizabeth (Caitlin Fitzgerald). Once it’s finally finished, fifteen years after their divorce, Miranda delivers Station Eleven to her former partner , the last gift Arthur will ever receive.

As an adult, played by Mackenzie Davis, Kirsten has joined a group called the Traveling Symphony, a caravan that circles Lake Michigan each year to perform plays for a depleted populace. (Their repertoire is mostly Shakespeare, though one would-be member auditions with the monologue from Independence Day .) Kirsten is fiercely protective of the Symphony, a group whose motto—borrowed from Station Eleven, and before that, Star Trek: Voyager— holds that “survival is insufficient,” and preserving life is of little use without art to enhance and elevate it. That defensive instinct kicks into overdrive with the appearance of a mysterious Prophet (Daniel Zovatto), who attracts a flock of “post-pan” children with a very different quote from Kirsten’s treasured keepsake: “There is no before.”

How the Prophet knows Station Eleven is something of a mystery, though Station Eleven as a whole has no interest in holding its cards close to its chest. Certain reveals arrive far earlier than they do in the novel, one of many savvy tweaks Somerville and his writers make in bringing Mandel’s vision to the screen. Some characters who barely interact in the book develop deep bonds in the show; others are separated while their literary counterparts stuck together. But some of the most impressive adaptive choices belong to production designer Ruth Ammon, who turns the hollowed-out Midwest into a lush landscape of overgrown ruins and makeshift, scavenged setups. A doctor sets up a maternity ward in the empty aisles of a big box store; an abandoned gas station overflows with flowers and foliage, a juxtaposition out of Alex Garland’s Annihilation. The Traveling Symphony fashions bits and bobs of repurposed items into costumes, a tactile illustration of their determination to keep the flame of tradition alive.

As Station Eleven progresses, novel readers will start to notice even deeper changes than pace, structure, or casting. (The show is more diverse in ways that feel matter-of-fact, never forced; Arthur now hails from Mexico, not British Columbia, while Miranda is a Black woman who works for an African shipping magnate.) In a way, it’s more empathetic, or at least more willing to allow multiple points of view on how humanity should move on from its downfall. Mandel’s Prophet is an out-and-out monster; Zovatto’s is disturbing yet vulnerable, and allowed to make his case for leaving the past behind. One can understand why kids who’ve never known another life might tire of their elders harping on about something called “Instagram”; we can even get why some flu survivors wouldn’t rue their loss as much as others. As our own debates about prevention protocols have shown, disasters can bring out the worst in people along with the best. You can’t blame some cynics for judging accordingly.

Some of Station Eleven ’s most striking scenes take place in a fictional outpost known as the Severn City Airport, where Arthur’s estranged best friend Clark (David Wilmot) gets stranded with Elizabeth and their son, Tyler (Julian Obradors). There, they form a community with strict quarantine procedures, safeguarding a stockpile of defunct technology they call the Museum of Civilization. Depending on how you look at it, the Museum is either a defiant show of resilience or a creepy relic—and Station Eleven gives each vantage equal weight. One of the strongest episodes charts the Airport’s slow evolution into the Museum, going from uncertainty to new normal under Clark’s unlikely leadership. It was around then that I realized why Station Eleven worked so well despite, or perhaps because of, its awkward timing. The show doesn’t adjust its reality to clumsily remind us of COVID-19 in a blatant bid for relevance. Instead, Station Eleven uses our firsthand experience of a pandemic to ease us into its own version of one, with details like the characters’ use of N95s forging a connection between their reality and ours. If you let it, it’s worth the jolt.

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'Station Eleven' Meets the End of the World With Optimism | Review

The first three episodes of 'Station Eleven' premiere December 16 on HBO Max.

In terms of timing, Station Eleven has just about everything working against it. There are no two ways around the fact that the HBO Max miniseries, adapted from the book by Emily St. John Mandel , centers around a pandemic — and is additionally poised to drop in the midst of a landscape where pandemic concerns have left us simultaneously tense, primed for whatever might come next, and exhausted by our present circumstances. But while the apprehension surrounding this fictional premise and its all-too-real similarities to our current situation is understandable, it's how the series illustrates what comes after disaster, and what survives along humanity's own ability to persevere, that makes it an unexpectedly compelling watch — and the end result makes for one of the best TV shows of the year.

What endures, even after societal and technological collapse? (The answer: a lot of art.) What does it feel like to navigate a world in the aftermath of a massive tragedy — or even twenty years on? (Surreal and strange and terrifying and, in some places, side-splittingly funny.) Station Eleven , which hails from The Leftovers writer and Maniac creator Patrick Somerville , spends the entirety of its 10 episodes exploring these questions in addition to so many others, and while the mere concept of the show would have many preemptively convinced that the story is simply a downer, Station Eleven manages to skillfully thread the needle between something that could leave viewers more disillusioned than ever and a successful pandemic adaptation that manages, against all odds, to be... actually pretty hopeful.

RELATED: Himesh Patel on 'The Luminaries', Understanding 'Tenet', and Telling a Pandemic Story in 'Station Eleven'

A significant portion of that success rests on the shoulders of the show's incredible cast. Station Eleven explores both the years leading up to the fateful event and the years that follow, and the dual timelines are anchored by a run of memorable performances. On the night everything changes, paramedic-in-training Jeevan Chaudhary ( Yesterday 's Himesh Patel ) is sitting in the audience during a stage production of King Lear when its lead actor Arthur Leander ( Gael Garcia Bernal ) collapses from a heart attack. In the chaos that follows, Jeevan finds himself looking after the play's youngest performer, eight-year-old aspiring actor Kirsten Raymonde ( Matilda Lawler ) — but little do either of them realize that they'll become the unlikeliest of quarantine companions when news of a flu outbreak begins to spread across New York City and, soon after, the world. Twenty years later, a now-adult Kirsten ( Mackenzie Davis ) has joined up with a nomadic Shakespeare troupe known as the Traveling Symphony (made up of such delightful supporting actors including Lori Petty , Philippine Velge , and Joe Pingue ), whose path crosses with that of a man known as The Prophet ( Daniel Zovatto ) and his cult of young, impressionable followers seemingly at random — but he might have more of a connection to the performers than anyone initially suspects.

What Station Eleven never fails to convey is the importance of community and relationships, both while the world is picking up the pieces immediately in the aftermath of devastation and enduring two decades on, as well as the connectivity that art can provide. There's a reason that, as technology begins to fail and the last of the city lights wink out, humanity gravitates toward other forms of escape from their present situation. In the post-pandemic world of the series, books and theater and music have absolutely thrived, with people reaching for stories and songs that will comfort themselves and provide a beacon of hope to others in need. One pivotal episode centers around a small group of characters turning a scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet into a means of catharsis and a way to forgive the wrongs of the past. Young Kirsten develops a particular attachment to a comic book she's given right before the world goes dark — the titular story of Station Eleven — reading it over and over again to the point of memorization by the time she reaches adulthood, where it becomes more of a familiar comfort, a security blanket narrative.

But the show also has something intriguing to say about how we as individuals engage with a specific piece of media — and how two people can end up having very different interpretations of the same art. Kirsten believes, perhaps naively, that she is the only one to survive the apocalypse who has even read Station Eleven because only a limited number of copies were printed before the world ended — but as the series reveals, that is definitely not the case. Not only is someone else familiar with the comic, but they've taken the concepts of the story and twisted them into something like a personal manifesto, and the ripple effects of that separate read end up having some of the most dramatic consequences for various characters over the course of the miniseries' 10 episodes. There are moments of despair, of violence, but the difference is that Station Eleven doesn't portray them in a manner that borders on relish or gives the impression that the show itself is numbed to the damage. A good amount of that visual substance comes from distinguished director Hiro Murai , who helmed the pilot and whose creative aesthetic defines much of the show's look from its most critical point forward.

Station Eleven is the quintessential case of an adaptation that doesn't just draw from the best parts of the original novel but actually finds a way to improve on the source material. Its singular flaw, really, is the timing of its release, but the final product is so provoking, poignant, and ultimately optimistic that it becomes an indelible triumph of television, a story that succeeds separately from the book, and one of the best small-screen contributions to 2021. Maybe that's reason enough for any viewers who might be curious about giving this post-pandemic world a try.

Station Eleven premieres with its first three episodes on December 16, only on HBO Max.

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel: Review

Emily St. John Mandel explores our viral collapse in her National Book Award-shortlisted post-apocalypse novel

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British Columbia-born novelist Emily St. John Mandel assuredly knew about Ebola — a viral strain first identified in 1976 — when she imagined her “Georgia Flu” in her novel Station Eleven . But the Georgia Flu — named after the former Soviet republic — makes Ebola look like a case of the sniffles. If you touch an infected person, you’ll likely contract it; if you contract it, you’ll likely die. In Mandel’s imagination, the disease wipes out a vast swath of humanity — so much so that all our technologies, ranging from computers to motor vehicles, are rendered useless. After the Georgia Flu there is no electricity or fossil fuel. The Internet vanishes as if it had never existed. Society reverts to a scavenger economy, its members surviving through the use or adaptation of artifacts left behind by the dead.

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Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel: Review Back to video

then is a post-apocalypse novel, which begins one night when a fading movie star named  Arthur Leander performs in a production of

at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre. Halfway through the performance  Leander collapses on stage with a heart attack. A paramedic, one Jeevan Chaudhary, and a cardiologist in the audience attempt to revive Leander, but to no avail. Leander dies — and his passing seems to mark the last moments of normality on planet Earth. By the next day the alarm has rung, panic ensues, and nothing is ever the same again.

Why Mandel chooses to launch her narrative in this manner is not immediately clear, although it will make more sense to the reader as the novel proceeds. For one thing, Arthur Leander will turn out to be the node connecting all the major characters — his first wife Miranda, an artist who creates a graphic novel named Station Eleven about a lost space station; his old friend Clark Thompson, an organizational psychologist and corporate consultant who helps create a viable, post-apocalypse community of 300 or so individuals in an abandoned airport; Kirstin Raymonde, who appears on stage with Leander as a seven-or-eight-year-old child actress; and Jeevan Chaudhary, the paramedic who trains himself to be a physician in a world without hospitals or clinics.

Half the novel takes place before the Georgia Flu apocalypse and half about 20 years later, a dual narrative of sorts that offers Mandel an opportunity to make some implicit reflections on art, for one thing. Art and culture have always been a sore point of post-apocalypse novelists — it is hard, it seems, for writers envisioning the future to imagine what kind of art would characterize that future. In this respect, Mandel’s post-apocalypse does not suffer in comparison to the present, represented in her novel mostly by Hollywood and by celebrity culture. Chaudhary, for example, is a paparazzo before he decides to do something useful by becoming a paramedic.

Children who grew up with the apocalypse, meanwhile, can only marvel that once there were huge metal airplanes that flew through the air, and devices that enabled you to talk to a person on another continent

In the post-apocalypse world, by contrast, Kirsten joins a caravan of some 30 artists called the Travelling Symphony. They go from ruined town to ruined town, presenting classical music and Shakespeare. At first the troupe offers modern plays to their ravaged audiences, but soon discover to their surprise that these audiences prefer Shakespeare. This may seem improbable to some readers, but as a member of the troupe comments, “People want what was best about the world.” In a poignant note, Mandel informs us that the musician who made that pronouncement has found it difficult to live in the present. “He’d played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.”

As for contemporary art, Miranda with her comic books fulfils the remark of Ezra Pound that the artist is the antennae of the race. Her story, Station Eleven , written and drawn before the Georgia flu, is the story of humans marooned on a highly advanced space station which is more like a small planet. Presiding over the space station, with its “deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, orange and crimson skies with two moons on the horizon,” is a physicist named Dr. Eleven. There is also a restive population living beneath the oceans known as the Underseas. One of them assassinates a colleague of Dr. Eleven, and leaves a note: “We were not meant for this world. Let us go home.” Dr. Eleven reflects afterwards, “The first sentence of the assassin’s note rang true. We were not meant for this world. I returned to my city, to my shattered life and damaged home, to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

This is prophetic of the shattered life and loneliness of post-apocalypse men and women, survivors of a fearful plague who try to forget the sweetness of life on the Earth they once knew. Children who grew up with the apocalypse, meanwhile, can only marvel that once there were huge metal airplanes that flew through the air, and devices that enabled you to talk to a person on another continent.

Religion is another delicate matter for future fiction writers. If their doomsday is fairly close in time they are faced with the problem of what to do with organized religion, still a potent force in our society. One would think that in Mandel’s post-apocalypse the odd evangelical Protestant or observant Jew would wander through the landscape. (And what about the papacy? Does that still exist?) Mandel’s solution to this problem is to channel what religious fervour exists into malign cults, shedding blood at the behest of their insane leaders and twisted prophets. This is believable.

The collapse also reminds the reader that we live in what communications authority Eric  McLuhan calls “a wild fairyland of our own making.” In this fairyland, marvels abound

As post-apocalypse novels go, the gracefully written and suspenseful Station Eleven is quite a bit less harrowing than, say, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful, though, especially in Mandel’s description of the first few days of the plague, when stranded passengers in airports come to realize they would never board a plane again, and they would never be rescued by National Guardsmen with cups of hot coffee and blankets. The collapse also reminds the reader that we live in what communications authority Eric  McLuhan calls “a wild fairyland of our own making.” In this fairyland, marvels abound.

The collapse of all this into chaos brings to mind Gabriel Syme, the poet protagonist of G.K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday . Syme argues for the poetry of things working properly, for the beauty of the predictable, for the marvel of being able to take a subway train at Toronto’s Union Station and arrive with virtual certainty at St. Clair Avenue in that same city.

In this spirit of wonder  Kirsten summons up a restored society, which she can hardly believe in. “You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light,” she imagines. “You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the  Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth.”

No surprise the inhabitants of Station Eleven , and the inhabitants of long- abandoned airports, yearn for this fairyland.

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Station Eleven Is a Profound Television Experience

I know what you’re going to say about Station Eleven , and I get it. After nearly two years of living through a pandemic in real life, the last thing you want to do is watch a show about a pandemic.

But here’s the thing, and I say this with the utmost respect and love: You are wrong. Station Eleven , an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s superb, unexpectedly prescient 2014 novel , is a limited series you should see, not despite the stress we’ve endured in 2020 and 2021 but because of it. Created by Patrick Somerville, whose past credits include Made for Love , Maniac, and, most tellingly, The Leftovers , Station Eleven is a beautifully wrought piece of storytelling that will certainly remind audiences of the coronavirus — it focuses on a flu that spreads rapidly, causing panic, quarantining, and an immense loss of life — but it also presents a much more extreme version of a pandemic than the one we’ve confronted.

The sickness in this HBO Max series, whose first three episodes drop on Thursday, instantly starts taking out humans and basic infrastructure to such an extent that it seems non-hyperbolic when it is referred to as “the end of the world.” (Audio from a television broadcast notes that the survival rate with this flu is one in 1,000 and that Chicago, where the series is initially set, “is not Chicago anymore. It’s just 2.5 million bodies.”) Yet Station Eleven is, at its core, an uplifting reaffirmation of the value of life and human connection that argues that Americans can and will come together to help one another in the most dire of circumstances.

Somerville and his fellow writers have done a very smart job of interpreting Mandel’s work, keeping key elements, excising others, and reshaping the narrative to make this series function as both a postapocalyptic account and commentary on the role art plays in sustaining and fortifying the human spirit during times of crisis. Given the involvement of Somerville and executive producer–writer Nick Cuse, another alum of The Leftovers , it’s not surprising that the tone of Station Eleven feels of a piece with that HBO drama, another moving portrait of what happens in the aftermath of a tragedy. Like The Leftovers , Station Eleven doesn’t spend any time attempting to explain its catalytic event — we never learn exactly how this flu spread so quickly or why it could not be contained. These ten episodes are much more interested in how human beings cope when they try to go on after losing nearly everyone they love and everything that once was familiar.

The series opens in more or less the same way the novel does, with actor Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) collapsing onstage in the middle of a production of King Lear . Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an audience member, is one of the first to recognize what is happening to Arthur — and the only person in the ensuing chaos to take one of the young members of the cast, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), under his wing and help her get home from the theater. Unfortunately, the concept of home fundamentally changes overnight as the contagion and news about it spreads, leading Jeevan and his brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), to become Kirsten’s guardians.

Station Eleven slides in all directions on its x-y-axis, moving forward in time 20 years, when we find the adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) on the road with a roving band of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony, and back again to the earliest days of the outbreak as well as to events that occurred before it. A number of shows this year have tried, with varied success, to adopt a similar time-jumping structure, but few have managed it with the sense of purpose and elegance that Station Eleven does. In the two years we’ve spent living with COVID, most of us have learned that our sense of time gets incredibly skewed during a pandemic. Days, months, and years blur together. They do too in Station Eleven , in which images of a barely occupied, overgrown Chicago two decades in the future are folded into moments when the flu has just begun and the city still looks normal. Dialogue from conversations that took place years earlier bleed into what is happening in 2040.

Even though there is a hard dividing line between pre- and post-pandemic life, the series emphasizes that history still finds a way to repeat itself and creep into the present even when we think it’s all been packed away. All four of the series’ directors — Hiro Murai, Jeremy Podeswa, Helen Shaver, and Lucy Tcherniak — lean into that overlapping, almost dreamy quality without sacrificing the stark realities of what’s involved in surviving without modern resources.

The scope also expands to focus on multiple figures within its massive ensemble, including Clark (David Wilmot), a friend of Arthur’s who is traveling to retrieve his body when all hell breaks loose; Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), an actress with whom Arthur has a child and who eventually becomes connected to Clark; the Conductor (Lori Petty), the outspoken, quietly heartbroken leader of the Symphony; Alex (Philippine Velge), a member of the troupe who has more or less been raised by Kirsten; and Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthur’s ex-wife who wrote, illustrated, and self-published a graphic novel called Station Eleven . Text from Miranda’s comic, which was passed on to young Kirsten in the early days of the pandemic, echoes throughout the episodes as though its verses are biblical. “I remember damage” is a line uttered more than once; “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die” is another. While these quotes come from the graphic novel, they resonate strongly with what the characters in the series are experiencing, a reflection of how fiction and art can feel as though they’ve been tailored specifically to the present and the contours of one’s own private heart.

This is a theme the series touches upon over and over again — when the Symphony’s actors find transcendence through Shakespeare, or Frank busts out a rap he spent days working on, or young Kirsten softly, but not without joy, sings “The First Noel” at a particularly bleak turning point a few days before Christmas. (All of the performances in this series are excellent, but I can’t say enough about what a grounded and pure presence Lawler is here. She’s just extraordinary and makes an entirely believable 1.0 version of Davis.) Music, theater, and literature can provide both an escape from our circumstances and a way of processing them that becomes forever intertwined with those circumstances. Nothing illustrates that more effectively than the comic Station Eleven and the way Kirsten treasures it as both a tether to the before times and a means of shedding the shackles of time altogether. “Arthur gave me Station Eleven ,” the elder Kirsten explains in episode eight. “And when I read it, it didn’t matter that the world was ending. Because it was the world.”

The fact that Kirsten and others derive such pleasure and meaning from Station Eleven , the graphic novel, during a pandemic becomes even more profound when one realizes that Station Eleven , the HBO Max adaptation, does something similar for us during our own pandemic. Our world isn’t ending even though COVID is still a presence in it. But when you watch Station Eleven and become immersed in it, it really does become the whole wide world. What a gift.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, station eleven.

Some people might not be ready for HBO Max’s “Station Eleven.” After all, it’s a story of a pandemic that destroys most of the planet and divides its survivors. While it’s based on a 2014 acclaimed novel by Emily St. John Mandel, the show has something to say that feels unique in 2021, about what we think we’ve lost forever and what we discover will somehow return to us. It’s a show that resonates in a different way now than it would have pre-pandemic, but I think it would have been incredibly powerful whenever it came out because its themes are timeless. They just feel a little more urgent in 2021.

Created by Patrick Somerville (“Maniac”) with a premiere directed by Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”), “Station Eleven” opens in Chicago on the eve of a world-destroying pandemic. Jeevan ( Himesh Patel ) is at a production of King Lear when he realizes that the lead actor, a star named Arthur Leander ( Gael Garcia Bernal) is having a heart attack. He’s the first one to rush to the stage and try and save the actor's life, which thrusts him into an unusual role. The tragic event forces Jeevan into becoming the guardian of Arthur’s child co-star Kirsten ( Matilda Lawler ) because her regular “wrangler” is occupied. Jeevan agrees to walk Kirsten home ... and then the world literally collapses.

Much more than COVID, the pandemic that pushes its way across the globe in “Station Eleven” is almost instantly population-destroying. The story jumps forward 20 years and reveals Kirsten ( Mackenzie Davis ) is still alive, a leader in a traveling company of performers that rolls across the land, doing theater for fellow survivors. I’m not sure how much the construction of “Station Eleven” mirrors the book, but it’s incredibly robust storytelling in television form as it moves back and forth between the early days of the pandemic, some key events from before the end of the world, the first 100 days after, and 20 years later, using each section to not just fill in plot details but thematically and emotionally comment on one another. The writing also blissfully embraces episodic structure, often leaving major characters for an entire hour to fill in the role that another will play in this saga. For example, Danielle Deadwyler leads the third episode as Miranda Carroll, the former partner of Arthur. She happens to be the author of a graphic novel called Station Eleven , and she hears of Arthur’s heart attack while she’s overseas, realizing she will probably never make it home again.

Home feels like an important theme of “Station Eleven.” What does it mean when the basic structures of society fall apart? Is it where we are or who we’re with? The phenomenal Irish stage actor David Wilmot plays Clark, who ends up making a new home in an abandoned Michigan airport with a group of survivors there, including Arthur’s new wife Elizabeth (Caitlin Fitzgerald) and son Tyler (Julian Obradors). All of these places and people will intertwine in a way that will undoubtedly seem forced to some viewers but, the biggest inspiration here is Shakespeare—the very plot of Hamlet impacts the narrative—and so there’s an element of “Station Eleven” that should be appreciated as grand, theatrical tragedy.

That’s especially true because of the role that theatre plays in the narrative. This is a story of performers, a famous one who influences a younger one, who then decides that art can’t be lost even as civilization crumbles. It’s also a story of acts of kindness, which becomes its most moving theme for me. Jeevan is the first man to stand up when he senses another person is struggling, and that decision changes the lives of so many people, really setting the entire story in motion—nothing here is the same without it. I’m a sucker for stories of one unselfish act starting a butterfly effect through the lives of others, and when I sat back and considered that aspect of “Station Eleven” after the incredibly moving finale, I was so impressed with how this journey had been crafted. It’s the first show since the end of “The Leftovers” that reminds me of that masterpiece, another program about loss and connection, and what I consider one of the best dramas of all time. (It should be noted that Somerville was a writer on "The Leftovers," so the influence isn't coincidental.)

Like “The Leftovers,” “Station Eleven” can also be charmingly unpredictable. It has a dark, unexpected sense of humor. It balances almost broadly melodramatic scenes of emotion with more surreal moments of unexpected plot. And it doesn’t have a false performance. Davis somehow finds a way to reflect both the voice of reason that Kirsten became and the little girl who never went home after her friend died in front of her. Patel is similarly subtle in that he could have overplayed a hero role in Jeevan but finds more of a relatable everyman tone that pays off in the final episodes. He's just the guy who meets the moment and doesn’t even realize that so many people don’t. Wilmot is a natural, charismatic performer. Bernal and Deadwyler only have a few scenes compared to the rest, but they make the most of them. Daniel Zovatto plays a mysterious character who calls himself The Prophet, a walking study in how trauma can form a destructive personality. And then small roles are filled out by vibrant character actors like David Cross , Lori Petty , Enrico Colantoni , and Timothy Simons , among others. I loved every performance.

Again, “Station Eleven” will be too much for some people right now, especially those dealing with the loss of a loved one over the last couple years, but there’s also an incredibly moving undercurrent of hope that pulses through this production. Loss reshapes the world, but it doesn’t stop it from turning.

First three episodes premiere on HBO Max today. Whole series screened for review.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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COMMENTS

'Station Eleven,' by Emily St. John Mandel
Sept. 12, 2014. Emily St. John Mandel's fourth novel, "Station Eleven," begins with a spectacular end. One night, in a Toronto theater, onstage performing the role of King Lear, 51-year-old ...
Review: 'Sea of Tranquility,' by Emily St. John Mandel
A Dazzling New Foray into Speculative Fiction From Emily St. John Mandel In "Station Eleven," she explored fallout from a pandemic. Now, in "Sea of Tranquility," Mandel takes up ...
STATION ELEVEN
New York Times Bestseller. National Book Award Finalist. Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness. In her fourth novel, Mandel ( The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but ...
In "Station Eleven," All Art Is Adaptation
Katy Waldman reflects on the dynamics, and the similarities, of life and art as represented in "Station Eleven," the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel and the 2021 HBO Max adaptation.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.
HBO Max's 'Station Eleven' review: A humane and profound apocalypse : NPR
HBO Max's 'Station Eleven' review: A humane and profound apocalypse The 10-episode adaptation of the best-selling novel about a virus that wipes out most of humanity softens the book's harder ...
Station Eleven review
A much-tipped novel about memory, art and survival after a flu pandemic wipes out 99% of humanity. Read Justine Jordan's gripping review of Station Eleven.
What 'Station Eleven' changed from the book and why
Dec. 16, 2021 5:34 PM PT. The first minutes of "Station Eleven" take place during a stage play. When an actor suddenly pauses his lines and collapses, Jeevan, played by Himesh Patel, jumps up ...
Station Eleven review: The beautiful HBO Max series changes the book
The new HBO 10-episode limited series based on the novel may believe in immortal stories, but it makes so many changes to Mandel's novel that it probably doesn't count Station Eleven among ...
Station Eleven review
H ow deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. I read Emily St John Mandel's bestselling Station Eleven shortly ...
Station Eleven
Dec 16, 2021. Station Eleven takes Mandel's book and amps up its sense of a cozy post-apocalypse, where humanity comes together, rather than drifting apart. I entered the series deeply skeptical, and I left it feeling at least semi-hopeful for what humanity might yet become, even after the end. ...
Book Marks reviews of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Pan. Never has a book convinced me more of society's looming demise than Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, an apocalyptic novel about a world just like our own that, much as our own might, dissolves after a new strain of influenza eradicates 99 percent of the human population …. Confronting the end of society and recording it in a ...
EW book review: 'Station Eleven,' by Emily St. John Mandel
Perhaps the very idea of another postapocalyptic tale exhausts you, but do stay, linger for a bit. Emily St. John Mandel's tender and lovely new novel, Station Eleven, indeed begins when the ...
If You Can Bear It, 'Station Eleven' Is Exactly What We Need Right Now
Chronicling the lead-up, onset, and aftermath of a virus that decimates 99 percent of the human population, the insightful HBO series is worth the cost to, in a sense, relive the past two years
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, David Manet
The New York Times Book Review - Sigrid Nunez. ... "Station Eleven is the kind of book that speaks to dozens of the readers in me—the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist. It is a brilliant novel, ...
Station Eleven Review: HBO Max Show Meets the End Times With Optimism
Station Eleven is the quintessential case of an adaptation that doesn't just draw from the best parts of the original novel but actually finds a way to improve on the source material. Its singular ...
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel: Review
Emily St. John Mandel explores our viral collapse in her National Book Award-shortlisted post-apocalypse novel. British Columbia-born novelist Emily St. John Mandel assuredly knew about Ebola ...
'Station Eleven' Review: A Profound Television Experience
A review of 'Station Eleven,' the series based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel about a flu pandemic and its aftermath, streaming on HBO Max beginning December 16.
Station Eleven movie review & film summary ()
Created by Patrick Somerville ("Maniac") with a premiere directed by Hiro Murai ("Atlanta"), "Station Eleven" opens in Chicago on the eve of a world-destroying pandemic. Jeevan (Himesh Patel) is at a production of King Lear when he realizes that the lead actor, a star named Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal) is having a heart attack.He's the first one to rush to the stage and ...