In roughly our time, after failing to save the life of an actor who collapses on stage, a trainee paramedic in Toronto receives a phone call from his doctor buddy at the hospital, telling him to lock himself in with some bottled water: a passenger from Russia has landed and is spreading a flu-like virus with a super-fast incubation period and nearly 100% transmission rate.
Twenty years later, civilization has collapsed. There is no electricity, no internal combustion engine, no modern medicine. In the Great Lakes region of North America, a group of actors and musicians walks along the abandoned road, bringing art and culture to the sparse settlements of survivors. Their motto is taken from Star Trek: Voyager: Survival is Insufficient.
Continue reading Station Eleven
The unhappy, child-encumbered housewife-trapped-in-stale-marriage almost certainly has the dubious honour of being both the most-experienced and (until the 20th century) least-written plot in Western literature. I understand why it’s important, but sometimes it feels like every novelist discovered it all at once and wants to lend her (or his) “unique” “perspective”. For that reason (TWIST!) it was a rare pleasure to encounter a book that explored the issue from an ACTUAL unique perspective. You might be aware of the synopsis (it was, after all, on the bestseller list): the bulk of the North American population of migrating monarch butterflies, which usually overwinters in Mexico, mysteriously turns up on the side of a mountain in Tennessee instead, on the farm of the Turnbow family. Continue reading Flight Behavior