Dear planet, we're feasting off you as you spiral deathward

Station Eleven is the author's 4th novel. Emily St. John Mandel the writer based in you-know-where, had despaired of finding a publisher for this most dystopian of all American novels because she had surmised the wave for the genre to have peaked and subsided. 

The fiction market is saturated with dystopian novels. Like the literature of the Cold War that expressed a collective anxiety of a nuclear destruction of the world, today's dystopian fiction is dominated by contemporary fears of climate catastrophes, pandemics, and epidemics, among others. However, there have been one too many dystopian novels of late, making, Ms. St. John Mandel, a relative newbie to the genre, anxious about the economic prospects of her book.  

To her surprise, however, no sooner than Station Eleven was completed, it found itself at the center of a minor (three-day long) bidding war, with Knopf snagging the deal with a six-figure advance, an amount that's three times that generated by her three previous novels taken together.

The money is good news because (good) writers deserve to make a living off their products just as app developers. But does the appetite for dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction tell us something about ourselves and our real-world attitude toward apocalypses? 

Take the recent epidemic of ebola in countries in West Africa. In terms of real action all that Americans could muster were something akin to fear-triggered hysteria of contamination. "Keep the African savages from the borders of our country" was the general collective scream that emerged from the millions of tweets generated by the news of the outbreak. Not much else in the way of empathic action was committed. I can imagine an entire posse of fantasy/post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction mongerers based in you-know-where, frenetically cranking out plots of a post-ebola world order ruled by an African warlord who is the sole survivor of the viral attack. 

That we are "entertained" by the world-is-coming-to-an-end spectre, is not unprecedented. During major global Wars and conflicts of the past, ranging from World War 2, the rise of fascism, through the Cold War and the ambiguously worded War on Terror, the book and movie market have been traditionally been glutted by visions of the ending of a familiar world order. This is what a market-based economy does: ossifies, and some would say, deflects, real fears of real impending doom, into dollars and emblems of entertainment, thus deferring perpetually the action that's badly needed to stem the tide of the doom.

The planet slowly spins netherwards but the maximum we can do is to convert the descent into subject matter for fiction to be bought, read and "engaged" with at a very nominal level of entertainment.

The one thing that differentiates the 21st century apocalyptic fiction from the Cold War one is the envisioning of a post-.Today's young, educated, readers, the future-conscious, career-conscious and cautious folks that they are, want to plan ahead of time. Thus the dystopian fiction of today, as epitomized by the likes of Ms. St. John Mandel's, tells us repeatedly that the "end" is just a new beginning.

The world of Station Eleven is an emergent, post-present world, one that has been wiped off by the flu virus. It's like a startup cosmos all over again.

Sleepless in dystopia

Karen Russell of the very original Swamplandia-fame, has written a dystopian novella for Atavistic Books: Sleep Donation.

The story is of a futuristic America from which sleep has been chased away by "our 24-hour news cycle, our polluted skies, crops and waterways, the bald eyeballs of our glowing devices."  

An epidemic of insomnia is not far off the horizon of possibility, particularly in the United States, where pharmaceutical corps are reaping bonanzas off classifying insomnia as a "disorder", and downplaying the fact that sleeplessness is a byproduct of a culture of hyperproductivity and deep economic insecurity.

What's innovative in Russells novella however is the concept of donating sleep. We've run a vast gamut of donations, of organs, of blood, of food, of clothes and other commodities, of money, of time even (in speculative fiction). But sleep?

The single most sought after donors of sleep in Russell's universe are babies, who become "deep, rich wells" of this most precious of things that we take for granted. Adult sleep comes with liabilities like nightmares and other kinds of dilutions, but babies "serenely churn forth a pure, bracing sleep, with zero adult terror corrupting it."

Atavistic Books has created an unique interactive video trailer of the book.  

2025?

2025 could very well be the title of a new Dave Egger's new novel, The Circle, because the plot is a close echo of the plot of George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984.

Orwell's totalitarian regime was the government, whereas Eggers' is a tech-behemoth resembling Google or Facebook. The company credo is "All That Happens Must Be Known." It has several Orwellian maxims like, "Secrets Are Lies," "Sharing Is Caring," and "Privacy Is Theft."

According to the New York Times, The Circle

Attempts to use the coming-of-age story of a young woman to create a parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. [Eggers] reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of “the hive mind” can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja.