There is art that mirrors life, life mirroring art – and then there is Station Eleven. In February 2020, filming was under way on an HBO Max adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel, which is set 20 years after a deadly flu outbreak has decimated the global population and brought civilisation as we know it to an end. Its plot centres on a nomadic troupe of actors who perform Shakespeare to the scattered settlements of the Great Lakes. But after shooting two episodes showing the “Georgia flu” bringing the city of Chicago to a stop, production was shut down by the very threat it depicted.
The book, which was a bestseller in 2014, was discovered anew as the real-life pandemic made us seek out stories to help process the emergent threat. (See the spike in streams of Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion; the return of Camus.) Its author, Emily St John Mandel, is often declared to have “predicted” the future, a claim she resists.
