Other interesting looking upcoming 2020 novels:
Hey look, Max Brooks has written his first non-Minecraft novel since World War Z:
And, holy shit, Susanna Clarke has her first novel since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell coming out:
And OMG, here’s David Mitchell with his first novel since Bone Clocks:
I’m reading station eleven based on many recommendations here and I’m finding I absolutely loathe the chapters dealing with the past. It doesn’t feellike it connects at all other than to fill in all these stupid stories around arthur who fucking died in the first chapter. And there are so many of these chapters in the past.
I don’t know if I can continue. I’m exactly half way through the book and looking for some encouragement that it gets better or focuses more on the current. I’m right where kirsten and August have gotten themselves separated from the symphony.
I don’t remember it well enough to say about the latter, but I also don’t recall being put off by the parallel narratives at all.
Yeah, this. I feel like if it’s not grabbing you by halfway through, you should cut your losses. Perfectly OK to not enjoy a book that others do.
I read Station Eleven several years ago. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember being very annoyed at it. If I recall, the entire connection between the past and future was some fucking paperweight or something. Why would I care about some fucking paperweight?
Anyway, I guess I felt betrayed by the promise of a post-apocalyptic survival novel when really the apocalypse had nothing to do with it at all.
The book keeps shifting between the past and the current. It is about half and half, if I remember correctly. I felt that telling the stories of the characters in the past and current added to the weight of the effects of the apocalypse, but I can see how it is not for everyone.
I usually get through the Lindon chapters really quickly, but since I don’t care about Jai Long yet, the Jai Long chapters take me a few months. I don’t know how you guys do it. Is it just momentum from the Lindon chapters that just carries you through, or you guys find Jai Long fascinating for some reason? I’m only on Chapter 6, this is the 3rd Jai Long chapter, and I haven’t learned too much about him in the first two, it was mostly action scenes. I have a hard time getting through the action when I don’t care about the character yet.
Honestly he is barely a blip in my memory. I don’t remember liking or disliking his chapters.
I found them somewhat annoying and tended to skim a bit when reading them. They go away after awhile. I’d honestly forgotten all about them.
So I finished Station Eleven and I absolutely can’t recommend it. What a disjointed mess of a book.
(for the record, it’s about a virus that basically wipes humanity out).
The story opens with this one actor dying on stage and then the author proceeds to hook certain people and a comic book into each other and IMO spending way, way too much time revisiting the past in order to do so.
While the dystopian non-electric, small hamlet future was somewhat interesting, and I really liked the concept of a travelling symphony who does both music and shakespeare as they travel from one hamlet to another, I found much of it to be shall we say simple.
So many words focused on the past is what really irritated and annoyed me. It’s like she started a story and then decides to not continue and she jumps around erratically (year 20, year -20, year 1, year 5, year 20, year 10, etc) and I was really put off by that.
Looking at the amazon reviews, it’s either 5 star or 1 star. I guess I fall into the 1 star portion.
Station Eleven, I felt, was a very deliberate response to The Road, and its style is somewhat reminiscent of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in that it’s science fiction masquerading as literary fiction (or vice versa) and has a non-signaled, non-linear timeline. ESJM does a bunch of work to both invite and then undermine those comparisons, and it’s definitely possible that some of the novel’s strength relies on them. What I really liked about the book was that the characters aren’t engineers or scientists or people with specialized technical knowledge. By placing actors, artists and musicians (even if they were erstwhile business types) at the front of the narrative, she demonstrates effectively how fragile and tenuous our technological civilization is, and how little our humanity depends on it.
First off, I really appreciate your perspective, I hadn’t thought of it like that. I am a survivalist at heart and I would like to see more story on the survival aspect.
For example, I was a voracious reader of Louis & Clark and even on the basic stuff of hunting, she treats deer as abundant. When in fact, during the L&C expedition, when they made a long camp at Astoria, they hunting teams had to venture further & further afield and it was challenging in some areas. Also, salt production was a HUGE deal to make dried meat. In Station Eleven, the author just treats food gathering pretty simple and at the end, with > 350 people at the airport, no mention of domestication / chickens / etc. It never earned its authenticity because it so much of the chapters were in the past.
Have to admit I would also enjoy that quite a bit. And I can’t think of any books that dwell on that aspect of post-apocalypse. Closest I can think of is KJ Parker’s Engineer trilogy, which goes into exquisite technical detail about everything you’d need to do to jumpstart a medieval culture into the industrial age from economic reform to the invention of welding.
Holy smokes, that is so close to one of my all time favorites, the Cross-Time engineer series by Leo Frankowski
Huh…if you like apocalypse fiction of that sort you might like Pulling Through by Dean Ing. It’s an older book following a day one story. The book is really two parts. The first half is an action adventure story that by today’s standards might seem kinda simple or juvenile. But the second half is a non fiction guide to survival. It’s kind of fun to read through it given the book was written in cold war times. One of the tips is to get those little bicycle generators that used the motion of the tire to light the bike headlight. Well, times have changed and I don’t know how many of those things are still common. But it’s definitely an interesting book.
If you’re into post-apocalypse fiction you might try the Commune series by Joshua Gayou, about rebuilding civilization after a coronal mass ejection event. It’s not going to win any awards, but its entertaining and (best of all) cheap. I believe the 4 book box set is only 99 cents on Amazon right now.
The first two books were okay, but the third started to get a bit silly and I never picked up the fourth.
Thats pretty interesting - I really enjoyed the book, but was surprised as well as the book was more about how people coped with the massive changes to their world, than any real survivalism. Its a very good example on a setting being chosen mostly as a vehicle for the story, and not as much as the meat of the story itself.
I have to add, that I bought it on audbile (and kindle) and heard most of it whiile commuting, and the narrator was one of most pleasant sounding people I ever enjoyed listening to - That also adds to me liking the book a lot, of course.
It’s definitely not a survivalist novel. It’s a novel about people in a particular setting.
I think this is a very smart take on the book, and why I think it really pulled me in.
I am reading Armageddon. This is Expeditionary Force #8.
This book makes me feel like I’ve missed the previous book, there’s a bunch of action which is referred to that is not in any of the other books that I’ve read, and as far as I know I’ve read them all.
Very strange.
The books in this series are usually enjoyable however.