How science informs author Emily St. John Mandel’s fiction
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.
Key points
- And my solve for that, I thought, “What if I added a whole other layer of science fictional weirdness to try to make that work?” Enter the simulation hypothesis, which is the hypothesis that all of our reality is a simulation.
- 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 so that’s what got me into that little branch of science for Sea of Tranquility.
John Mandel, the award-winning author of Station Eleven, about her new book, Exit Party, which grapples with the question of the multiverse.
Additional details
- Emily, you are often writing about really interesting scientific ideas.
- So I start writing about my time-traveling detective, and then I run into the time travel narrative problem, the loops and the paradoxes and all the rest of it.
- There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Unexplainable wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch us on Netflix.
- The life you did not live, where you moved to a different city or took a different job or married a different person — any of those inflection points.
- Sea of Tranquility was the first book I wrote that had more of a hard sci-fi component, because I do have a time-traveling detective in that book.
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