Reviews and Comments

I downloaded this book from Kindle on Amazon's recommendation. I have never been so sorry to do so.

Station Eleven is an apocalypse novel in which none of the characters worry about food, clothing, or shelter. It is based around an actor who dies on stage during King Lear, and the various people who are associated with that person, including his first wife, who privately draws a comic book called Station Eleven, which is read by some of the younger people in the book.

There are few things I find unforgivable in a book, but excessive nostalgia and sentimentality are amongst them. Station Eleven is roughly 50% characters reminicing about their pasts, and when it isn't alluding to the past it's alluding to the near future where they're all dead. It's the same trick, every time, all the time. Multiple times from the same perspective. At first I was shocked, then I was appalled, and then finally I was embarrassed. Station Eleven doesn't simply overegg the pudding here: it puts icing on the wobbly undercooked blancmange and expects you to treat it like an artisanal pastry. Avoid.

As a zombie book, this has the advantage of seeing trained soldiers act like soldiers, trained scientists act like scientists, and trained teachers act like... complete idiots. Given that, it's not surprising that a 10 year old sentient zombie girl has issues staying close to them in order to survive. Especially when they smell of food.

Melenie is an interesting character in her own right, because as much as she thinks like a human, there are times when you're oddly aware that she isn't human, and she doesn't experience the world in human terms. Carey is a good writer, and her description of Melenie seeing shadows turn into light or tracking a car by smell is creepy enough without noting that these are abilities specifically useful for taking down humans.

I was disappointed that there wasn't as much interaction with the other actors in the world, but the action scenes are worthwhile and no-one does anything... well, people do silly things, but no-one acts out of character.

This is a good book to read, even if it feels awkward and painful to read sometimes.

As a self identified lesbian feminist, based in the San Francisco Mission in the early 1990s, Valerio had to transition the hard way -- with little public knowledge, with widespread condemnation from feminists like Janice Raymond, and so comes into manhood with a certain set of expectations, which then turn out to be either simplistic, or incorrect. He telegraphs this by admitting that he said he was a socialist so he could fit into the feminist circle at high school, even though he had no idea what the term meant.

Take, for example, his idea that men are inherently safer walking the streets at night than women. This turns out not to be the case -- he is mugged, punched in the face, and worse, realizes that other women and men perceive him as a threat. When he realizes, finally, that wearing a black leather jacket and shades as a man sends a different message than as a woman, I had to put the book down and wonder how on Earth he could have missed it.

This occurs again and again in the book; Valerio continually holds on to his sense of being "harmless" and an artist in the lesbian community even when it's clear he doesn't fit there any more.

He's no longer a woman, and he's not even a gay man. At work, the supervisor refers to him as "normal" -- not even an artist. Finally, his girlfriend calls him a sexist.

And sometimes it's hard to argue with that. Valerio refers back to his background as an artist as having a desire to shock people and hold transgressive views. You can see him struggling with this desire at various points in the book -- there are times when he has a complex idea in his head, but seems to express it in a way guaranteed to cause drama. Whether or not this is art is arguable, but Valerio seems to thrive on the attention in any case.

And then, there are times in the book where Valero just doesn't seem that bright. He's obviously not a scientist, but there are various observations in the book which make it clear Valerio hasn't done his research, and yet feels utterly secure in his personal experience:

"The male eye is excited by red." - false
"Women do tend to enjoy reading about sex more than looking at images." - false
"restructured my glands" - no
"[men and women have] astronomically different levels of T" - total bullshit

At the same time, there is a happy ending: Valerio grows and becomes more grounded in himself as he matures and understands himself better.