ABSTRACT
Crime fiction and speculative fiction may appear to occupy opposite ends of the genre fiction spectrum, with crime’s focus on resolving a past disruption and speculative fiction’s focus on imagining a future one. And yet, as Emily St. John Mandel’s loosely connected novels Station Eleven (2014), The Glass Hotel (2020), and Sea of Tranquility (2022) reveal, genre hybridity can produce exciting new insights and stories. This chapter charts Mandel’s use of a range of speculative fiction tropes—apocalypse, alternate worlds, ghosts, time travel, and even the simulation hypothesis—to argue that she places these in conversation with the epistemological and ethical question at the center of crime fiction in order to expand the power and reach of both genres. By giving voice to a devastating crime seldom centered in crime fiction—the Ponzi scheme—and by imagining a crime of kindness that cannot even exist until we have time travel, Mandel asks us to imagine futures in a way I believe is crucial to the continued development of Canadian crime fiction.
