As demonstrated by the raving review excerpts on the novel’s cover, Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 pandemic novel Station Eleven serves for many critics as a reminder of the unlikely beauty of the world. The novel labels as beautiful things—networks, ecologies—that are too complex to know. This labelling ties in with an appreciation of rather than a critique of the economic system that cannot be separated from the spread of the virus that sets the plot in motion. Contrary to what some critics claim, Station Eleven is not potentially subversive because it succeeds in imagining other possible futures than those Mandel describes as the “fevered summers of this century, this impossible heat” and the ecological collapse on the imaginary space station that appears in the novel. The novel’s potential, and to some extent the potential of Patrick Somerville’s 2021 TV adaption, lie rather in their illumination of the ideological limitations of a time and place where, for authors as well as for critics, the appreciation of complexity is held in higher esteem than any attempt to assess the ethical or political significance of the same phenomenon. I argue, then, that the role of criticism should not be to marvel with the literary work at whatever this work finds fascinating, but to avoid reading it on its own terms and instead interrogate its silences and blind spots—not to question its value as art, but to make the most of the ways in which it responds to historical moments and rhetorical situations.