This is my quarter Cannonball – I have reached my goal by mid-year. Dare I now try and complete a half Cannonball, after the failure of 2014?
My quarter is going to end on a high note – the remarkable Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This has of course been reviewed to death already this year, so what more can I add? For those few people who are not aware, this book centres on the survivors of a world wide flu epidemic, which is estimated to have killed 99.9% of the world’s population. The story goes back and forth, with an ensemble cast of characters each loosely linked to a Canadian actor. The tenet the characters tend to embody is that “survival is insufficient,” taken from a Star Trek episode. It is both dark and hopeful, an excellent entry into the field of post-apocolyptic fiction.
I finished this not long before I saw Mad Max: Fury Road, and I was actually struck by how different the worlds depicted are, particularly in terms of a joky conversation the delightful Mallory Ortberg had with Shrill on The Toast. She talks about how she would become a despot in that particular post-apocolyptic world, and it was about control of resources, in the end. In Mad Max, the resources are unimaginably scarce, and there is a tangible sense of suffering throughout the film. In Station Eleven, the world is still largely resource rich, except for such modern luxuries like electricity and the internet, and the suffering is less. Station Eleven’s people are focused on developing or retaining the something more over and above basic survival, while Furiosa and her allies are fighting to live at all, with some dignity. It was just an interesting juxtaposition, for me at least.
I have been thinking a lot this year about female characters in general. Furiosa is obviously an excellent character, and I think there are interesting female characters in Station Eleven as well. While I think that Kristen is the main protagonist, and she certainly has a lot of agency, I think that Miranda was on the whole more interesting. She is driven to create and forge her own future, and is enormously self-reliant. She is still sympathetic though, and in some ways reminds me of Furiosa.
In any case, the book was great, and I have recommended it to many people.
