If you pay any attention at all to book news on Twitter you will have seen people enthusing about a book called Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. It isn’t out until September, but already lots of people have been raving about how good it is. The Emporium Strikes Back, our little SF book club in Bath, managed to get ARCs to read. We discussed it on Wednesday night.

I should start by saying that Mandel writes some beautiful prose. If I have little else good to say about it, that’s because I read it as a science fiction reader, not as someone fairly new to the genre.

The basic plot of Station 11 is that something rather like the SARS epidemic of 2009 turns out to be actually as serious as the media scare stories make out, and that as a consequence 99% of the human population of the planet dies out. The book flips back and fore between life 20 years after the plague, and life just before it. In classic literary novel fashion it tells of the lives of a bunch of not very interesting people who are loosely connected before the plague; and some of whom meet up after it. There is a rather pathetic attempt to inject tension through the addition of a crazy religious cult, but even that turns into a damp squib.

If you haven’t read a lot of science fiction, the set-up may well seem new and innovative. In fact wiping out most of the Earth’s population via a plague dates back at least to George R. Stewart’s classic novel, Earth Abides (1949). Mostly these books try to make some sort of profound statement about how we monkeys will cope with such a disaster, about the value of civilization, and about the basic nature of mankind. Station 11 manages to be fairly convincing about the fragility of human civilization, but can’t do much beyond that except offer a quote from Star Trek.

Several people at the book club meeting mentioned the term “Cosy Catastrophe”. Mandel isn’t British, but she is Canadian, which perhaps explains the relative lack of Libertarian Survivalists in the book. People in the post-plague world are mostly nice and polite. Even when they have to take action to preserve their lives, they don’t like to talk about it afterwards.

Being science fiction readers, we spent a lot of time discussing things we thought that people in the post-plague world might have done to make their lives better. We also talked a lot about the nature of the plague, and what happened to the virus after most of the humans were dead. Mandel didn’t seem to be much interested in such things. She was writing a book about people, and in part about celebrity culture. I don’t recall much discussion at all about the pre-plague section of the book, which speaks to how uninteresting we found most of the characters. There’s nothing wrong with a character driven novel, as long as the reader actually cares about what happens to some of the characters.

Something else that didn’t help is that, thanks to a huge publicity budget, the publishers have included a page from the Station 11 graphic novel tucked into the book. One of the characters, Miranda, spends all of her free time working on this graphic novel series. Eventually she self-publishes it, and copies find their way into the hands of other characters. The story is set in the far future on a space station that is now far from Earth and damaged. It sounded quite interesting, and I actually wanted to learn more about the people of the Undersea and their giant seahorse mounts. Unfortunately the sample page shows that Miranda had no talent, either as an artist or a script writer, which rather ruined the whole thing.

I’m sure the book will sell very well. That’s partly because of the huge marketing budget it has, but the emperor is by no means without clothes. The book is a very easy read. If you’ve never read a book of this type before it will doubtless seem very fresh and innovative. If you are the sort of person who reads celebrity magazines you may well find some of the characters interesting. Also, of course, many readers would become very bored by long discussions on the nature of viruses and the practicalities of post-plague life, so their absence is actually a good thing for the intended market. The one group of people who should not read this book are those who have read a lot of catastrophe fiction already and want things from it that Mandel doesn’t try to offer.

Oh, and if you are that sort of person, I recommend that you read The City Not Long After by Pat Murphy, which you will find better than Station 11 in just about every way possible. (It is a book that was shortlisted for the Clarke in a year in which Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney were amongst the jury, and if it didn’t win, well neither did Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.)