Emily St. John Mandel in September 2016. | Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
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?
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I host the science podcast Unexplainable, where we often speak to scientists about their attempts to puzzle through life’s greatest mysteries, but academic researchers aren’t the only people wrestling with these concepts.
On the latest episode of the show, I spoke with Emily St. John Mandel, the award-winning author of Station Eleven, about her new book, Exit Party, which grapples with the question of 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.
Below is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for clarity and length. 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.
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,
Neither can I.
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.
Where do you start with exploring these concepts?
It’s really book by book. 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.
And what that came out of was it was the spring of 2020. The pandemic hit. I was promoting The Glass Hotel on Zoom, and I thought that for my own sanity, it might be nice to be immersed in the grand project of a book. That can be good for you sometimes when everything is chaos, like in the early days of a pandemic.
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.
What do you mean?
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? That raises other questions like immortality — am I always going round and round in time? The causation gets really complicated and weird.
But I felt like, you know what? I’m going to write whatever I want. 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.
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. And something I love about that is you can find really smart people convincingly arguing either side.
I thought it was a cool idea, and I realized that I could use that to make time travel work. And so that’s what got me into that little branch of science for Sea of Tranquility.
And then Exit Party, I had an idea about writing about doppelgängers. I’d been thinking about it for years — the idea of a counter life.
Counter life?
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. I wondered if doppelgängers could be thought of as a sort of embodiment of a counter life. It’s another you who has lived a different life in a different version of reality. That’s what got me to the multiverse idea. But then I was also thinking, “Okay, well, I’ve thought about the counter life of the individual. What is the counter life of the state?”
And that can be a really interesting thought experiment. There are some very obvious inflection points in our recent history, but every country has them. You know, the election that went a different way or the decision made to go to war or not. A policy that was enacted or not enacted and the fallout from that, and any of those inflection points create a somewhat different country. It was thinking about counter lives and doubling, and that’s what got me to this idea of the multiverse.
You’re talking about these ideas almost like, “It’s a fix to this problem that I created.”
It often is. Exit Party opens with a woman going to a party, two doppelgängers show up, and somebody else disappears. I realized pretty early on, wait a minute, at some point I am going to have to account for where the doppelgängers came from, so in that case, it was definitely a fix. But it was also thinking about the double life of a state — the state that you could live in if things had gone a different direction at some inflection point.
Something that interested me as a thought experiment in writing this book is: How might the tropes of science fiction map onto actual lives? Doppelgängers are very science fictional. But we all have counter lives, so imagine those as the embodiment of the counter life. Or later in the novel, there’s a conversation about time travel. And the character says something to the effect of, “I think if you live long enough, you become a time traveler. It’s like you’re a migrant from another timeline.”
“I want to focus on how people respond in these interesting scenarios I’m putting them in.”
There’s nothing more science fictional than a time traveler. That is the definition of a trope, basically. But that is how adulthood works, or how time works. You learn to navigate the world as an adult, and then you look up one day and realize that world is long gone.
If you’re lucky enough to get to live for a while, if you live into your 80s or potentially even older, that world that you learned is really gone.
You get to a certain point in your life, you look back, and you realize you’re not really looking back at a life singular. It’s really one life after another, isn’t it?
I wanted to express that. You were a different person 10 years ago and living a different life, and I wanted to follow a character, Ari in this case, from one life into another.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, you drop us into a fairly dystopian world.
I mean, I collapse the United States in the first sentence…
I was almost expecting that we were going to enter into another world where we made different choices and everything worked out so wonderfully.
I mean, my wife wishes I would write a utopia.
No, it’s true. I do then present an equally dark vision. I think the key, though, and where I find hope personally in my life, but also in this book, is in transience — this idea that nothing lasts forever and everything ends.
There’s such obvious grief and loss attached to that idea, but I think there’s also a lot of hope. Because if I look at it through the lens of my personal life, the worst moments of my life did not last forever. You move through them, and there’s something else after that. Or if you look at it at a larger scale, the worst moments in your country’s life don’t last forever either.
In the second universe of the book, the authoritarian state, I was thinking in terms of modern-day surveillance states, but I was also thinking about East Germany and the Stasi system of citizen informants.
And you know, here’s where transience and hope intersect. A lot of what I know about them I learned in the DDR Museum in Berlin, because the Stasi are gone. We make museums about them. They’re both fairly dark visions, but in both sides of the book, we are moving through them toward something else.
You won’t always be in a terrible situation. You also won’t always be in a good situation. That’s where the loss comes in.
How did you go about trying to think through what the fractal parallel universes would look like?
I was thinking about that with the character Ari. She’s got this character defect. She’s pulled toward criminality. It’s this deep, fundamental proclivity that she has, and there’s a world where somebody like that just goes toward criminality and becomes a criminal, as she did in a previous part of her life.
But what if that same person were growing up in a much more repressive state where the consequences were much worse for breaking the rules? Maybe that interest in criminality pulls a person toward law enforcement, and it was interesting to think of that as almost two sides of the same coin.
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. When I first started working on Sea of Tranquility, I thought, “I want to figure out how the time machine works.” I guess it was a bit of insecurity on my part. So I spent some time reading about current ideas and technologies that I imagine eventually evolving into time traveling. I was reading about the quantum blockchain, and then after I’d spent a bit of time in that rabbit hole, I realized I don’t actually care.
I had this realization: If I’m not describing how a car engine works in the 2020 section, why do I care about the mechanics of the time machine? It’s literally just transport.
And that was kind of liberating, realizing that I care more about the characters. I want to focus on how people respond in these interesting scenarios I’m putting them in. So honestly, the level of scientific detail I’m aiming for is “plausible within the context of a literary novel,” which is a low bar.
For this parallel universe stuff, did you look into some of the physics debates about this?
A little bit. Like the simulation hypothesis, you can find smart people on either side. I feel very unqualified to participate in the debates.
But as a novelist, I’m like, This is interesting. I can work with this.
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