#emily st john mandel

[bookishfreedom]

my weekend: 🏕️🏊‍♀️🏔️📖💫🌲🛶

[trillscienceofficer]

Sometimes the Travelling Symphony thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night. At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it, especially at times when they had to camp between towns, when they were turned away at gunpoint from hostile places, when they were travelling in snow or rain through dangerous territory, actors and musicians carrying guns and crossbows, the horses exhaling great clouds of steam, times when they were cold and afraid and their feet were wet. Or times like now when the heat was unrelenting, July pressing down upon them an the blank walls of the forest on either side, walking by the hour and wondering if an unhinged prophet or his men might be chasing them, arguing to distract themselves from their terrible fear. “All I'm saying,” Dieter said, twelve hours out of St. Deborah by the Water, “is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn't lifted it from Star Trek.” He was walking near Kirsten and August. Survival is insufficient: Kirsten had had these words tattooed on her left forearm at the age of fifteen and had been arguing with Dieter about it almost ever since. Dieter harboured strong anti-tattoo sentiments. He said he'd seen a man die of an infected tattoo once. Kirsten also had two black knives tattooed on the back of her right wrist, but these were less troubling to Dieter, being much smaller and inked to mark specific events. “Yes,” Kirsten said, “I'm aware of your opinion on the subject, but it remains my favourite line of text in the world.” She considered Dieter one of her dearest friends. The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met. Midmorning, the sun not yet broken over the tops of the trees. The Symphony had walked through most of the night. Kirsten's feet hurt and she was delirious with exhaustion. It was strange, she kept thinking, that the prophet's dog had the same name as the dog in her comic books. She's never heard the name Luli before or since. “See, that illustrates the whole problem,” Dieter said. “The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favourite line of text is from Star Trek.” “The whole problem with that?” Kirsten felt that she might actually be dreaming at this point, and she longed desperately for a cool bath. “It's got to be one of the best lines ever written for a TV show,” August said. “Did you see that episode?” “I can't say I recall,” Dieter said. “I was never a fan.” “Kirsten?” Kirsten shrugged. She wasn't sure if she actually remembered anything at all of Star Trek, or if it was just that August had told her about it so many times that she's started to picture his stories in her head. “Don't tell me you've never seen Star Trek: Voyager,” August said hopefully. “That episode with those lost Borg and Seven of Nine?” “Remind me,” Kirsten said, and he brightened visibly. While he talked she allowed herself to imagine that she remembered it. A television in a living room, a ship moving through the night silence of space, her brother watching beside her, her parents—if she could only remember their faces—somewhere near.

Emily St John Mandel, “Station Eleven”

[lillyli-74]

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

~Emily St. John Mandel

[ech0ech0ech0]

If you're going through hell, keep going

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation // Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven // The Magnus Archives 165 - Revolutions // Hannah Baer’s words, featured in Raving by McKenzie Wark // Alice Oseman, Solitaire // Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts // The School of Life, Overcoming Bad Inner Voices, sampled in Mirror by Porter Robinson

[theboyatthebustop]

In honor of this post of mine getting over one hundred notes, I decided to do a sequel because I found some more

Edit: found some more

[lastseenleaving]

Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel

"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?”

She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

[lananis]

can't recommend this book enough

[wellconstructedsentences]

Kirsten stood in the state of suspension that always came over her at the end of performances, a sense of having flown very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 50 – Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I read this book over the course of one day and two flights,, which on the one hand was probably not the best way to do it but on the other is kind of appropriate given the prominence of travel and dislocation to the narrative. Anyway, reading so quickly and then spending a week on vacation without time to work on this review does mean that my thoughts are all a bit vague and muddled, so apologies about that in advance. Anyways!

The only other work of St. John Mandel’s I’ve read was Station Eleven, which was easily one of the best things I read last year and good enough to put this on my TBR as well. I went in basically entirely blind, beyond the basics of ‘time travel’ and ‘COVID novel’. It might just be that my expectations were too high, but frankly I found it a fairly disappointing read, and pretty strictly inferior to Station Eleven in just about everything – the later even manages to be a better pandemic novel despite the handicap of being published in 2014. My main reaction to finishing it was something along the lines of ‘that’s it?’ and then going back to staring down at the clouds.

The book jumps POVs a fair bit, but the deuteragonists are an author on a global book tour in the days before a pandemic sweeps the world (and moon) in the 22nd century, and a bit of an aimless failson in the 23rd who gets a job investigating a temporal anomaly through the power of nepotism and goes back to interview her and a few others across the centuries who were touched by it. The detective is the one who drives essentially all of the plot and makes all the choices – none of the POVs are really filled with a surfeit of passion or drive, the author is the only one who seems to particularly like her life – but by wordcount and focus I very much got the sense that the author was far more of the book’s emotional heart than the 20th or 21st century POVs. (Which is something of a shame, because I found both of them rather more compelling in the screentime they did have, being honest).

The plot is, well, thin. Our 23rd century POV (a hotel detective) is repeatedly told that he will be tempted to do something (save the author from her scheduled pandemic death) and warned of consequences if he does, repeatedly promises that he will not, and then as soon as the chance presents itself does the thing with basically no warning or introspection, after which he faces almost exactly the consequences he was warned of. He is then saved through the power of a supergenius sister ex machina, and the whole anomaly is tied up in a neat time loop in a vague reality-as-narrative sort of way. As a work that’s more literary than genre the characters all felt kind of flat and static, no one ever really surprised or fascinated me.

And as far as it as a science fiction novel goes, I don’t know – there’s a decent chance it’s a much more impressive read if you haven’t zoned out scrolling past dozens of pages of earnest debate on the simulation hypothesis and read/watched however many different time loop stories before? It could have all fit pretty nicely in a mid-season Doctor Who episode, honestly, and I don’t really mean that as a compliment.

Emotionally, the experience of living through COVID is pretty clearly at the heart of the thing. Both the sense of pure terror at realizing your survival is a matter of luck and statistics, the isolation and alienation from the world that’s part and parcel of lockdown, the sort of awesome horror at looking back across history and realizing how totally unremarkable seeing such mass death around you is over the centuries, how in a generation it will be nothing but a bit of trivia. This stuff was definitely more compelling than the rest of the book, though it did fall prey to a rapidly growing pet peeve of mine and just kind of forgot all the ‘essential workers’ who weren’t doctors or nurses and just kind of write them out of the universal pandemic lockdown experience.

Anyway yeah, not in any sense a badly written book, but I found it a disappointment.

[bigbookslilreads]

"She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees."

-- Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

[phenakistoskope]

i finished reading emily st. john mandel's sea of tranquility. here's what caught my eye; there was a stark absence of human workers, save perhaps gaspery, but he's a fringe case, he plays at being a security guard for about five minutes, but still, life is startlingly middle class, aristocratic even, all remittances, concerts and parties in new york city, international book tours. only robots tend the farms.

yet, colonies thrive. in north america, on the moon, on titan, in the far colonies. the hostile physiologies of the moon, titan, and deep space do not hinder the work of science. science! it just works! fully automated luxury space english middle class life. the horrors of the pandemic are contained by an apartment, cauterized with a time traveller's prophecy, death and disability remain on the news.

i'm not saying i disliked the book, but i wouldn't go so far as to say i liked it. station eleven had given me the impression that st. john mandel was a far more sensitive writer. perhaps i was mistaken, perhaps writing a pandemic is more difficult as one lives through it, perhaps i read it too quickly and missed something.

[hopecatcher]

We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

[supernutellastuff]

Yooo I just read station eleven it was fantastic

(saw your tag on a post)

Also I really want to see those graphic novels it’s a shame they’re not real

Hiii I love Station Eleven so much. I can go on for years about it!

I first read it in December 2019, when news of coronavirus was just breaking. So that was obviously an anxiety-provoking experience haha. And then I re-read it last year, "post pandemic", and it holds up so well! Apocalyptic/sci-fi stories that centre the beauty of humanity, art, music, culture, cooperation, community, etc is one of my fav genres (re Mad Max Fury Road, Arrival, etc.). And yes my favourite bit was those graphic novels, it was so satisfying to read how she came up with the idea, the description of the text and the artwork - and it was brilliant to see how it touched multiple lives. I want to read them too!

Have you watched the HBO show based on the book? I still haven't, I'm a little scared it might not capture the book's essence haha. Also, I recommend the author's other books - Glass Castle and Sea of Tranquility - they don't reach the heights of Station Eleven imo but they're still pretty good, and they're set in parallel/overlapping timelines so some familiar characters turn up :)

[mackmp3]

thinking about the line in sea of tranquility 'we all secretly long for a world with less technology'. yeah.

[macademmia]

FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009) dir. WES ANDERSON / SEA OF TRANQUILITY (2022) by EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL