Station Eleven
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. In a future in which a pandemic has left few survivors, actress Kirsten Raymonde travels with a troupe performing Shakespeare and finds herself in a community run by a deranged prophet. The plot contains mild profanity and violence.
Stats for nerds
16recommend
26mentions
25people
2015–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Agatha Christie, for some reason. My mom and I used to watch Mrs. Marple and Poirot on public television so there's perhaps nostalgia involved, but, she was a great writer. A lot of her work is now in the public domain and there are Standard Ebook versions of them, making them an easy pick if you like mysteries or are willing to give mysteries a try:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie
For the near future, I've got some of Emily St. John Mandel's books loaded up (I liked the Station Eleven series a lot), as well as Peter Heller's The River.
- "Exit Party," Emily St. John Mandel's ["Station Eleven," among others] new novel. It's her best yet which is saying A LOT.
- Fiction:
A Little Life - challenging to read but exceptional
Sci-fi
Three Body Problem trilogy - forget the Netflix series the books are excellent, in my opinion #2 was the peak.
The Glass Hotel, Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility - anything by Emily St. John Mandel - hard to place but her distinct writing style transports me.
Non-fiction:
American Moonshot - fine The Path to Power - anything Caro writes is worth reading
- On A Red Station Drifting - Aliette de Bodard: a wild mixture of a station, run by a failing AI and strict Vietnamese behavioural rules.
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel, plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven
Nine Fox Gambit: Yoon Ha Lee: disgraced officer of space fleet must capture fortress protected by complex mathematics.
Theatre of the Gods and Hunters and Collectors by Matt Suddain. Both defy a one line plot description, look them up. Theatre was one of the best books I have ever read.
This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Two opposing generals mess with time to gain a personal meeting.
Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill: the story of a scavenger robot
- I'll second that recommendation, and in that same sort of vibe I'd also recommend Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and Station Eleven (2021-2022). They all have aspects of stories within stories, which is a trope that I particularly enjoy.
- Might be worthwhile to read this after Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. While not a formal trilogy, there are a lot of connections and quite honestly they are each totally amazing.
Last Night in Montreal, by the same author, is also great, and totally different from the above three.
