A Vox article follows a Unexplainable podcast episode in which host Byrd Pinkerton talks with Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel about how she brings science into her fiction. Mandel, who has no formal science training but worked in a cancer research lab, says the simulation hypothesis made time travel work in Sea of Tranquility and that multiverses and doppelgängers shaped her new, deliberately dark novel Exit Party, where she finds hope in transience.