How science informs author Emily St. John Mandel’s fiction
The world is full of unanswered questions and strange ideas. Do parallel universes exist? What would it look like if a pandemic wiped out life as we know it? Is time travel possible? I host the science podcast Unexplainable, where we often speak to scientists about their attempts to puzzle through life’s greatest mysteries, but […]
Emily St. John Mandel, the author of Station Eleven and Exit Party, often incorporates scientific concepts into her fiction. She explains that she is drawn to science because she finds it interesting and enjoys reading about fringe ideas. Her scientific background is limited, but she has worked in a cancer research lab and has interacted with scientists, which has helped her understand scientific concepts.
Mandel starts writing about scientific ideas differently for each book. For Sea of Tranquility, she created a time-traveling detective to address the paradoxes and complications of time travel. In Exit Party, she explored the concept of doppelgängers and the multiverse as a way to think about alternative realities and the "counter life" that could have resulted from different choices and events.
She sees these scientific ideas as a means to create engaging narratives and explore how people might respond to various scenarios.
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