Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel explores two fractured US futures

Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party, imagines two near-future versions of a fractured United States: one shaped by post-civil-war chaos and another by totalitarian surveillance. WIRED interviewed Mandel for the book’s 15 September release.

Mandel said she began writing the novel in 2022, amid political polarisation and concern about the possibility of a second American civil war. She described the book as a story about crime, resilience and trying to remain decent as society breaks down.

The novel’s two central characters represent different lives shaped by different versions of the same country. Mandel said she was interested in the idea of a “counter life” — the life a person might have lived after making different choices — and how identity is influenced by the environment surrounding it.

Mandel also discussed her concerns about artificial intelligence and trust. She said she does not use AI, partly because she has found it unreliable, and argued that flawed detection tools could wrongly accuse writers of using AI. She described the reputational consequences as potentially severe for authors trying to prove that they wrote their own work.

The interview revisited the renewed attention given to Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven during the Covid-19 pandemic, when some readers and journalists portrayed her as a “pandemic prophet”. Mandel rejected that framing, saying she was no more prepared for the pandemic than anyone else.

Despite its bleak settings, Mandel said Exit Party is a hopeful book. Its two imagined societies are unstable, but she said both could eventually give way to something more stable and potentially better. The novel is speculative fiction, rather than a forecast of imminent US collapse.