I’m sitting down to read this interview with Emily St. John Mandel, author of STATION ELEVEN, this year’s EXIT PARTY, and from a few years ago SEA OF TRANQUILITY, which I was distinctly unimpressed by (see this post). Since then, just a few months ago, I read STATION ELEVEN, which I liked better, though its SF elements were no less superficial.
Vox, Byrd Pinkerton and Joanna Solotaroff, yesterday 12 Nov 2026: How science informs author Emily St. John Mandel’s fiction, subtitled “The author of Station Eleven talks science, fiction, and doppelgängers.”
The new book concerns the multiverse. “We talked about how she approaches science in her fiction, and how, even if we never get clear answers to some of these strange ideas, they can still help us think deeply about ourselves and our world.”
Emily, you are often writing about really interesting scientific ideas. Why do you put these scientific concepts at the heart of the books that you write?
Because they’re so interesting. I don’t have an educational background in science. I didn’t study it in school. I did work in a cancer research lab for years, so I’ve definitely hung out with scientists. I was great with grant budgets. But I could not actually tell you the mechanisms by which microRNA 335 impacts breast cancer metastasis.
… But you know what? Science is interesting to me. I like reading about ideas in the fringes of science. But my understanding is that physicists are more or less evenly split on the question of whether we’re living in a multiverse.
Later, we see she is aware of at least one other science fiction writer.
When you’re borrowing these scientific concepts, do you feel trapped by the science of it all? Do you feel like you have to stay within certain boundaries?
I don’t, which may annoy some readers of sci-fi, but I think there’s a really interesting choice that you have to make if you’re writing speculative fiction, and that’s how accurate do you want to be, or how deep into the weeds do you want to go with your science fictional technology?
On one end of the spectrum, you’ve got an author like Cixin Liu, who wrote The Three-Body Problem. I really love his work. He gets so granular about those technologies. …
Alas, I was similarly unimpressed by Cixin Liu, as I wrote about here over a decade ago.
It can be revelatory when someone takes a fresh perspective on a familiar theme — someone whose mind hasn’t been molded by ‘conventional wisdom’ about, for instance, how time travel works. She says:
I’ve always loved time travel novels as a reader and a fan. The problem with the time travel narrative, though, is that it falls apart instantly.
If you think about it for a second, it’s like, if I walk out of this podcast studio and I’m transported back to 1812, was I not always going to walk out of the studio and be transported back to 1812? And doesn’t reality break upon my arrival?
But this is just naivete. She thinks no one has thought about these things before.
She’s not original; rather her books are examples of how common sf tropes have been absorbed by conventional fiction as devices without any real thought being applied. Such books are only superficially science fiction. (And they’re the complete opposite of books by someone like M. John Harrison.)
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Here’s another item that, in a sense, is about how science fiction is misunderstood by the mundanes.
Paul Krugman, 10 Nov 2026: The Cyberpunking of America (Fixed), subtitled “How the tech broligarchs tried to inflict their dystopian dreams on the rest of us”
(The word “fixed” refers to a previous attempt by Krugman to post the piece.)
This is about the imminent demise of Elon Musk’s cybertruck.
A few years ago my wife and I were driving in New Jersey, when she suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that incredibly ugly car?” It was her first sighting of a Cybertruck in the wild.
Now Tesla is finally pulling the plug on the vehicle, which one person quoted in a New York Times report describes as looking like a mechanical cockroach — an image one can’t unsee.
So what’s the big deal? Businesses make bum investments all the time. It’s true that the Cybertruck’s failure was spectacular — Dave Phillips, the author of the piece, who was clearly having fun, pointed out that it’s unfair to compare the Cybertruck to the Edsel, which had much bigger sales.
Put in cultural context:
The 7-year arc of the Cybertruck coincided with the transformation of Musk’s public image from that of a planet-friendly innovator to that of a racist, conspiracy-theorizing, African-children-killing oligarch. Once upon a time driving a Tesla was a way to signal that you were rich but environmentally conscious. But driving a Cybertruck became a signal of MAGA fealty.
Yet there is an even wider cultural context here. The Cybertruck was the physical embodiment of a dystopian ideology that has become dominant among billionaire tech bros — an ideology that draws heavily from cyberpunk novels and movies.
Earlier tech bros worshiped Ayn Rand. Now it’s William Gibson and Blade Runner. They miss the point:
But rather than taking cyberpunk’s visions of dystopia as cautionary tales, they saw them as manifestos. And with the great power that flows from great wealth, they have been trying to turn their adolescent dreams into reality.
The cybertruck; Mark Zuckerberg’s “metaverse.” Oligarchs’ dreams:
Crucially, while you or I might read Neuromancer or watch Blade Runner and shudder at their visions of the future, billionaire tech bros surely picture themselves living in that future not as unemployed and homeless, but as edgelords ruling the world. Technological dystopia may sound like a nightmare to most of us, but for the broligarchs — despite their occasional expressions of concern and mumbling about Universal Basic Income — it’s basically a dream, which they are trying to use their financial and political power to make come true.
But the public isn’t buying it — literally in the case of Cybertrucks and the Metaverse, figuratively in the form of overwhelming voter opposition to data centers and AI in general.
But both of this pieces are examples of how science fiction, in the context of popular and fine culture, has evolved. A hundred years ago, it was crudely written pulp magazine stories.
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Briefly.
- Slate, Shirin Ali, yesterday: Mississippi Couldn’t Stop Scott Colom’s Victory—but It Wasn’t for Lack of Trying
- JMG, 11 Nov: GOP Rep. Tom Emmer Vows Revenge On Democrats: “You Will Regret Ever Putting Your Name On A Ballot” | They’re after tribal revenge, with no discussion of problems, issues, solutions.
- John Pavlovitz, 5 Nov 2026: Dear Democrats, Please Don’t Screw This Up.
- NY Times, Tanner Greer, 10 Nov 2026: Republicans Are Still Clueless About Why They Lost | It’s not about the war, or affordability: it’s about increasingly apparent corruption.
