HBO's Station Eleven Imagines More Than Just White People Could Survive an Apocalyptic Pandemic

Nearly ten years ago, a book called Station Eleven imagined a world where a pandemic killed about 99% of the population of the world. The survivors imagined a new world where they tried to retain what was best about culture, art and society. Yet as writer Nino McQuown notes in their critical review of the book and the newly released HBO adaptation, the book's perspective was incomplete:

"Over and over again the novel tries to make white wealthy culture feel universal, with extended reveries about what humanity has lost: 'almost everything, almost everyone.' Yet even those eulogies betray their singular perspective ... it’s a book that aims to speak to our shared humanity, but its perspective is only ever that of people who swim in backyard pools, who trust the cops, whose water flows lead-free through well-maintained municipal pipes. Everyone else’s culture is, more or less, erased."

A decade later, after a real-life much less deadly pandemic of our own, HBO released their own adaptation of the book and much has changed. From recasting characters to shifting storylines, this revised version of the story is more inclusive, nuanced and seems to correct many of the shortcomings of the original novel.

In the process, the show also shines a spotlight on white futurism, the idea that the mostly white futurists and science fiction writers have too rarely imagined truly inclusive futures. The thing is, when you put a diverse group of showrunners and writers around a table to develop a script, sometimes you end up with a vision for exactly the kind of future that no one writer would imagine on their own.