“The virus in Station Eleven would have burned out before it could kill off the entire population,” Mandel points out when I pose the question legions of fans are sending her way: Is she worried? The author is preternaturally-composed - dressed in a checked toffee blazer and mahogany boots, she has an air of Betty Draper just returned from riding lessons. You can long for the world you live in right now. You can flirt with the experience of collapse. But there can be something reassuring about taking in a fictional disaster in the midst of a real one. Inhaling a novel about a contagion that brings civilization to an end while news about COVID-19 sends hand-sanitizer sales vaulting doesn’t sound logical. “I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” the perplexed author wrote on Twitter, to which her readers replied: We would. Spread via tiny aerosol particles, the Georgia flu is like our seasonal one and, yes, the coronavirus, on steroids - mercury-popping fevers, rattling coughs, respiratory distress, followed by death. In under a week, television stations have gone to static as entire production crews die out. Cell lines jam, and phones stop working within two days.
John Mandel’s 2014 blockbuster hit, the “Georgia flu” wipes out over 99 percent of humanity - it moves so quickly that within 24 hours of the virus reaching America, all air travel is shut down.
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