"Station Eleven" is a science fiction novel published by Emily St. John Mandel in 2014. The novel imagines the world -- but takes place around the Great Lakes region of Canada -- after a flu pandemic has killed most of the population.
It's an awesome and frightening book, and I'm thinking about it a lot lately, with the news of a possible/probably climate catastrophe in as little as a decade. That makes me think about living in a rural area versus an urban area, and how rural dwellers might have a better chance at surviving such a catastrophe because we have more resources and access to natural resources.
In the novel, there is no gas because there is no one to extract the oil, truck it, process it, etc. But what has stayed with me, even though it was the smallest of scenes near the end of the book, was the revelation -- it hadn't occurred to me throughout the book -- that there also would be no medicine.
The book reveals how civilization is reduced to its most primitive state by the destruction of most of the population and utilizes the relics of the past to survive in the new world order.
No medicine.
So today, as I try to keep a cold sore from busting out inside my nose (the place where my cold sores flare up) three days before I speak at a teachers' conference, I am grateful for medicine. For the medicine that helps with an ailment as minor as a cold sore but even more grateful for the medicine that is helping my husband prevent a future stroke.
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