Anyone who followed the Morning News’s Tournament of Books this year (which I assume – possibly naively – includes everyone I know) may recall Nicole Cliffe’s judging round, in which she wrote, of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, the following:
“Station Eleven turned out to be the fiction equivalent of the 121st episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Kamala, played by the luminous Famke Janssen, is an empathic metamorph designed to adapt herself to become the perfect mate for an important diplomat. She winds up adapting to Picard, instead — it’s a great episode, you should watch it. And in this metaphor I am Picard, and Station Eleven is Kamala. It would be impossible for a book to be better suited for me. It is unfair that I have been placed in a position to evaluate its merits at all.”