Then the pandemic hit, and it seemed to me that it might be interesting to look at the autofiction through a sci-fi lens and combine it with the time travel.

I’d also been interested in time travel narratives for a long time. I wasn’t sure I’d ever do anything with it sometimes I just write fragments that don’t end up in a finished book. I wanted to write about the strangeness of the tour experience, so I’d been playing around with autofiction in the months leading up to the pandemic. On the other hand, people say the most interesting things to me on tour, and the word “interesting” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. I feel profound gratitude for being able to do this work and live this life. Vincent, who has been entwined with Alkaitis, takes off on a ship, and disappears.ĮSJM: I started with the autofiction sections. Her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, revolves around Vincent, a videographer who works as a bartender at the Hotel Caiette on Vancouver Island (in a fictitious community modeled on Denman Island, where Mandel was raised) as does her half sibling Paul, and a Bernie Madoff-type billionaire scam artist, Jonathan Alkaitis, whose comeuppance takes down his clients. Among the few survivors bent on rebuilding the world with art at its center: a troupe of actors and musicians who travel through “an archipelago of small towns” performing Shakespeare. The novel Station Eleven covers the years before, during and after a raging virus “exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth,” wiping out 99 percent of the population of the Earth.

“At times dark and heartbreaking, it’s also luminous, wondrous, even funny-the most uplifting show about life after the end of the world that you are likely to see,” wrote New York Times film critic James Poniewozik. In December 2021, as she prepared to launch the book April 5, HBO released the limited series based on her 2014 pandemic novel Station Eleven, drawing raves. John Mandel wrote her newest novel, Sea of Tranquility, during the pandemic.

Emily st john mandel