Experiments in Madness

Just finished Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.   This is a Great Michigan Read selection from the Michigan Humanities Council, so there were lots of copies at my local library.  Emily is a good writer, her prose described as understated in the wiki for this novel.  There's also a certain nostalgia and melancholy that she evokes that works for her subject matter.

Ms. St. John Mandel tells the story of a collection of survivors from the "Georgian Flu", which wipes out most of humanity.  The main characters are part of the Traveling Symphony, a collection of people who travel the post apocalyptic Great Lakes area entertaining the small collections of people that have survived.   The narrative bounces between different viewpoints and times, though unlike other authors, she manages to keep it from getting confusing.  Much of the story is set in the current world prior to the collapse.   The post collapse society part would likely be a short story if told by itself.

This story will slip into you quietly, then wake you in the middle of the night.  There's nothing here all that new, and I have my quibbles about why the Center for Disease Control and their counterparts failed so miserably.  But understated is accurate, and the characters feel like real people.   She adds just the right amount of detail to flesh out her world and characters without bogging down the story.

Anyone who can handle a story that's carved up into chunks of different character perspectives and past/future will love this story.   There are several scenes of violent death and hints of other terrible events, but Emily doesn't glamorize these, sparing the reader the gorier details other authors might revel in.  

I read someone was planning to develop this as a movie.  I think with the right screenplay writers this could also be a good TV series.

Ms. St. John Mandel denies this is science fiction, but I feel it is in the best tradition of speculative fiction.  It feels a bit like a Clifford Simak story, in that much of the story takes place in pastoral scenes, rather than in a tin can in space or some megapolis.  It also evokes Margaret Atwood, though she avoids the creeping doom feeling in much of Ms. Atwood's fiction. 

There and Back Again is nominally a science fiction novel by Pat Murphy, and her imaginary friend Max Merriwell.  What it really is: a retelling of the Hobbit in space.   It's silly and fun, almost seems like an experiment by the author, and turned out so well she decided to have it published.  While Pat got some of the oddity of traveling near the speed of light right, there is also much that is scientifically improbable/impossible.  

However, if you ever were irritated that there are no female characters in the Hobbit, this does fix that, since the majority of the characters are clones of one woman.   Now a more thorough exploration of the idea of a community of clones and the ramifications of being a twin to everyone around you would have been more interesting from a speculative fiction angle.  Ms. Murphy barely scratches the surface here.  And one could also set a whole novel on the planet that stands in for Lake Town, the inhabitants having descended from a mixed group that included clone members.

While entertaining, unless you're a super fan of the Hobbit and want to read everything even remotely related to it there's not enough here for me to recommend it, other than as a pleasant diversion.   On the other hand, perhaps there is value here I'm dismissing, since I've read plenty of novels which where poorly done rewrites of other novels.  This has the charm of the Hobbit and is well written.