{"id":20,"date":"2022-04-26T16:55:54","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T16:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.voxghostwriting.com\/blog\/?p=20"},"modified":"2022-04-26T16:55:54","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T16:55:54","slug":"the-author-of-station-eleven-wrote-a-new-pandemic-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.voxghostwriting.com\/blog\/the-author-of-station-eleven-wrote-a-new-pandemic-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"The author of Station Eleven wrote a new pandemic novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2014, Emily St. John Mandel published\u00a0Station Eleven<\/em>, her bestselling novel about a pandemic. Which meant that in 2020, she acquired a peculiar sort of status as one of the ones who saw it coming, somehow; what Vox\u2019s Alissa Wilkinson called one of the\u00a0plague prophets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Station Eleven<\/em>\u00a0wasn\u2019t really about its pandemic, though; that was just the plot engine that got Mandel to her artsy post-apocalyptic world of traveling Shakespeare companies,\u00a0beautifully rendered in the recent HBO Max TV adaptation<\/a>. Mandel\u2019s latest book,\u00a0Sea of Tranquility<\/em><\/a>, is a true pandemic novel. It exists to try to grapple with the world the Covid-19 pandemic made and what the pandemic taught us about reality. The results are lovely, life-affirming, and occasionally but unmistakably clumsy.<\/p>\n

Sea of Tranquility<\/em>\u00a0also exists to play, metatextually, with what it was like to be Emily St. John Mandel in 2020. One of the central characters is Olive Llewellyn, an author in the 23rd century who lives on the moon and has found herself abruptly famous after her book about a fictional pandemic is a big hit. She\u2019s on book tour \u2014 this section cheekily titled \u201cThe Last Book Tour on Earth\u201d \u2014 when she finds herself caught up in another pandemic, this one real.<\/p>\n

Abruptly, Olive\u2019s universe narrows itself: long days indoors, trying to work while simultaneously educating her child from home, her book tour gone virtual. She finds herself delivering holographic lectures on the great uptick of interest in postapocalyptic literature over the past decade.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I\u2019m guessing I\u2019m not the first to ask you what it\u2019s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic,\u201d\u00a0one journalist remarks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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