Station Eleven Background

Post-apocalyptic Fiction

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel, but it breaks many of the conventions of this genre. While many dystopian novels focus on the breakdown of society, Mandel moves 20 years into the future, after the global pandemic kills 99 percent of the world’s population. In doing so, she skips past the most brutal stage of the apocalypse to the emergence of a new civilization. In addition, her multiple nonlinear timelines follow disparate threads 30 years into the past and 20 years into the new world order, focusing more on the individual stories and how they intersect than the larger scope of the post-apocalyptic world.

Station Eleven is also a post-apocalyptic novel, meaning that it takes place after an apocalypse: a world-ending or almost world-ending event. Famous post-apocalyptic novels include Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.

Dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres often intersect, as dystopian societies frequently spring up after a world-altering or world-ruining event. The breakdown of social norms that follow a disaster can lead to the authoritarian societies that often populate dystopian novels. While the characteristics of dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels often share many characteristics, some elements separate them.

Context

Pandemics through History
The fictional Georgia Flu in Station Eleven kills 99 percent of the world’s population, making it worse than any real-world pandemic in history. One wave of bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 percent of Europe’s population, in just a few years (1347–1351).

The bubonic plague never fully went away, and subsequent outbreaks would also kill millions of people. More recent epidemics and pandemics include H1N1 (swine flu), which was declared a pandemic in 2009, and ebola, a highly contagious epidemic that spread like wildfire throughout western Africa in 2014. Of course, 2019 and 2020 have seen a new pandemic sweep the world: COVID-19.

Shakespeare and King Lear
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) lived through several outbreaks of bubonic plague in his lifetime. He wrote some of his most famous plays during these times, including King Lear, which features heavily in Station Eleven. King Lear is the story of an aging and powerful king who dismisses the people who really love him in favor of people who flatter him and increase his power. Station Eleven begins with Arthur playing the tragic hero Lear himself, and Lear and Arthur have some undeniable parallels. Like Lear, Arthur is coming to the end of a life that was outwardly successful but inwardly unsatisfying. They both try to make amends before they die, but they are not able to fully do so.