Darwin’s Early Adopters

During the icy winter of 1860, Franklin Sanborn preferred to stay indoors. The bad weather in Concord, Massachusetts, was cause enough, but the young political activist had another reason: he feared ...

Shakespeare Off the Grid

Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction, depicts a world radically depopulated by a vicious outbreak of superflu. A traveling ...

Love Among the Ruins

The action in The Dog Stars, Peter Heller’s first novel, is confined to a small area of postapocalyptic Colorado, nine years after a superflu outbreak has killed off the vast majority—“ninety nine ...

Turn, Turn …

Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, set in the near future, begins with an “invisible catastrophe” known as the slowing, a gradual deceleration of the earth’s rotation that extends days and nights ...