Emily St. John Mandel on Science Fiction and Finding Hope Through Art

Goodreads: Sea of Tranquility is so observant and character driven, and it also incorporates these classic science fiction concepts like time travel and lunar colonies. Did you read a lot of sci-fi growing up?

ESJM: Well, I had a really strange education. I was homeschooled when I was a kid. My parents were hippies, and it was a back-to-the-land counterculture thing that people were doing.
 
The curriculum was not particularly organized or rigorous. What was wonderful about it, though, is that I had an incredible amount of time to read. I read constantly when I was a kid, and I was really into fantasy. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia. And then later, the Wheel of Time series, The Lord of the Rings.
 
Later there was a ton of sci-fi—I remember reading a lot of Asimov as a teenager. So yeah, I've been into those ideas for a really long time. As I've gotten older, I've read less sci-fi, as a percentage of my total books per year, but I do still read it and love it. Like everybody else, I love Cixin Liu’s books, The Three-Body Problem series. I'm really into The Dark Forest right now. It's just fantastic.

GR: It feels like the old-school distinctions between literary fiction and genre fiction are finally starting to break down. Incorporating speculative fiction elements is no longer against the rules for “serious” books.

ESJM: You know, it’s been exciting to see the way the literary world has changed in that regard. I think it's a more expansive and generous way to think about our literature.
 
It used to be a lot different. My first novel was called Last Night in Montreal, and it was rejected by probably 35 publishers before it found a home. A lot of the rejection letters came down to the question of where it would be shelved: We don't know how we would market a book that's both detective fiction and literary fiction—you know, whatever that is.
 
I experienced that most vividly with Station Eleven. I've had people come up to me and say, you know, I've heard good things about your book, but I don't read sci-fi. Then—with the same book—people will come up and say, I've heard good things, but I only read sci-fi. You can definitely fall through the crack between genres.
 
Very early on with Station Eleven, I resisted the sci-fi label—not because I don't respect sci-fi, but kind of the opposite. I felt like, are we really implying that a book with a speculative fiction premise can't be literature?
 
What I've come to is this idea that a book can be literary fiction and science fiction or a detective novel—or all three.

GR: Sea of Tranquility is like that, and it’s structured in such an intricate and interesting way, because of the time-travel elements. Did you have a particular strategy for resolving the paradoxes and keeping track of the various time frames?

ESJM: The structure of the book was kind of an homage to Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which is one of my very favorite novels. It’s got that wonderful symmetry about it—it marches forward in time, and then back, with the middle of the book as the peak, the far future.
 
I didn't completely adhere to it with Sea of Tranquility. I broke out of that in the very last section. But the only way that I could get past the time-travel paradox was by layering in the simulation hypothesis over the top. Otherwise you have that problem where if you travel back in time, you instantly create a loop and you were always going to travel back in time. It just goes round and round.

GR: Yes, the simulation hypothesis! For readers who might not be familiar, this concerns an idea that’s been floating around in the culture for a while: the possibility that we’re all living in a computer simulation. How did you first come across that and decide to write about it?

ESJM: Hmm, I'm trying to remember. It's been on my radar for years. I think it was just, you know, you surf around the internet late at night reading interesting articles, you jump from that one to that one to that one. And then several rungs down the rabbit hole, you read about the simulation hypothesis.  
 
It's just so fun to think about. Like, let’s suppose we really are in a simulation. For me the question that immediately follows that is—does it matter? It’s kind of an interesting thought, but I think it ultimately doesn't make a difference. I don't think our lives are less meaningful. If this is a simulation, I think we're still alive.
 
And I also think it goes back to, I guess, a broader philosophy of living your life, which is—look, you've got to create your own meaning here. That's up to you, no matter where you live. And that doesn't change if where you live is a simulation.

GR: Fans of your previous books will be happy to hear that several characters from The Glass Hotel cross over to Sea of Tranquility. I just loved the sibling relationship between Paul and Vincent. For you as an author, what is it about the sibling relationship that's interesting or compelling?

ESJM: I feel like that's a kind of relationship that I don't see represented in fiction as often as just straight-up friendship or romantic relationships. I'm the second of five in my family—I've got a lot of siblings. I've spent my life thinking about the way we relate to each other, the way that we can lead very different childhoods—even in the same family, same genes, born not that many years apart. And yeah, it's just an interesting area of investigation for me.

GR: There are all these intriguing meta elements in the new book. Without giving too much away, you have an author character on book tour who has written about a fictional pandemic, then gets caught up in an actual pandemic, which I imagine parallels your experience with Station Eleven and COVID. And your author character runs into some dubious people on that tour. Can you talk a little bit about playing with those meta elements?

ESJM: Yeah, absolutely. Those book tour sections, there is an obvious element of autofiction there. And they were the hardest sections to write. Because, you know, I have just so much gratitude for this life. It’s extraordinary to get to do what I do for a living, and I'm grateful for all of it.
 
And at the same time, it's amazing the things that some people will say to me on tour. I wanted to write about that and try to convey those two things at once. All of the things people say to her are things people have actually said to me.
 
The fictional element is that, in the book, it's all in the course of one tour. Whereas in reality, those are messed-up things that people said to me over the course of five or six years.

GR: So we’re all about books and book culture here at Goodreads, and we’ve found that our people are always interested in recommendations. Aren’t we all? What are some of the books on your nightstand these days?

ESJM: It's so funny, I read constantly, but whenever anybody asks me what I'm reading, I’m like—have I ever read a book? Let’s see, I'm reading The Dark Forest. Cixin Liu. And I'm also reading a book called Seven Days in the Art World, a really good nonfiction book. I think those are my two at the moment.

GR: How about a book you find yourself recommending a lot, over the years?

ESJM: Yeah, there are two I'm always recommending: Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. I just think it's a masterpiece. It's so good. And also A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s one of my favorite novels.

GR: I'm always curious about this: When you were a really little kid, do you remember the very first books that kind of tackled your brain?

ESJM: The first book I remember reading on my own and really loving was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. And it's one of those books where I'm sure if I went back, it would be completely different from how I remember it. So I will never go back. I'm just going to preserve that as a childhood memory.

GR: That’s a good policy. How about this: When you're reading for pleasure, do you ever read multiple books simultaneously? Or is it strictly one at a time?

ESHM: Umm—I go back and forth. Sometimes I'll have three books going. One of my favorite activities is, I have a walking desk with a treadmill. Sometimes, if I just want to move a little bit and do some reading, I'll have three books in front of me. I'll read, say, an essay from an essay collection, then a chapter of fiction, then a chapter of nonfiction. I keep cycling through until I run out of time.
 
But there are other times where I do just want to focus on a particular book. So yeah, I would say I swing back and forth.

GR: So the Station Eleven TV series has been a giant commercial and critical success on HBO Max. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never had so many people recommend a show and insist that I watch it.
 
ESJM: Oh, that’s nice to hear. Yeah, it's so good. And I’m just saying that as a fan—I had nothing to do with the production. I think that [showrunner] Patrick Somerville and his colleagues did such an incredible adaptation. I'm really happy with it all.
 
GR: One encouraging aspect of Station Eleven is that, for a postapocalyptic story, it has this sense of hope at its core.
 
ESJM: We really need that. It's been a long pandemic. Yeah, the series has this air of—it's a kind of desperate joy, for lack of a better phrase. What they're doing is really difficult, bringing a sense of joy into this postapocalyptic world. That’s maybe easier to do in fiction than it is on the screen because the show has to visually depict this fairly grim reality.
 
GR: It’s pretty clear that the culture is in a very anxious place just now. There's a lot of apocalyptic thinking, whether it's a virus, or the climate, or politics. So my last question (and I'm asking everybody this): Where do you find your sources for hope these days? I think maybe if we all swap and share, we can help one another out.
 
ESJM: I guess I’d say that reading is important for me, in that perspective. It's hard to say this without sounding pretentious, but I find a lot of hope in art.
 
If I think about it, the Station Eleven series is a story with a lot of joy in it. But on a kind of meta level, it's a series that was created during the pandemic, by people coming together to put on a show. And that's a big deal to me.
 
Yeah, I feel hope with art. Also, I have to say, there is such hope in small children. You know, the way they think, the brightness that they have about them. So, yeah, where do I find hope? Art and my six-year-old, I think.