Book: Sea of Tranquility: A Novel
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: Sci-fi
Rating: ★★★★★
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Opening: Edwin St. John St. Andrew, eighteen years old, hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic by steamship, eyes narrowed against the wind on the upper deck: he holds the railing with gloved hands, impatient for a glimpse of the unknown, trying to discern something—anything!—beyond sea and sky, but all he sees are shades of endless gray. He’s on his way to a different world. He’s more or less at the halfway point between England and Canada. I have been sent into exile, he tells himself, and he knows he’s being melodramatic, but nonetheless there’s a ring of truth to it.
Closing: When I wasn’t playing my violin in the airship terminal I liked to walk my dog in the streets between the towers. In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.
How I Came Across This Book: Goodreads Choice Awards 2022, winner of best sci-fi (here)
Review: Sea of Tranquility is an ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing sci-fi. At first, I was a bit confused by the multiple storylines marked by four different time periods, but as I continued reading, I was drawn into the intricately woven narrative and how each element gradually came together to form a complete picture.
Emily St. John Mandel masterfully blends the theme of time travel, pandemics, reality & simulations, and our search for meaning through Edwin St. John St. Andrew’s journey from Britain to Canada in 1912, Olive Llewellyn’s book tour from the moon colonies to Earth in 2203, and Gaspery Roberts’ investigation of a cosmic anomaly in 2401.
With each chapter offering new pieces to the puzzle, I found myself constantly flipping back and forth to fully grasp the intricacies of the narrative. This added layer of depth and complexity made reading The Sea of Tranquility an incredibly immersive experience. This, to me, was one of the biggest pleasures of reading it.
Strongly recommended.
Excerpts:
Did Olive actually wish she could live on Earth? She vacillated on the question. She’d lived all her life in the hundred and fifty square kilometers of the second moon colony, the imaginatively named Colony Two. She found it beautiful—Colony Two was a city of white stone, spired towers, tree-lined streets and small parks, alternating neighborhoods of tall buildings and little houses with miniature lawns, a river running under pedestrian archways—but there’s something to be said for unplanned cities. Colony Two was soothing in its symmetry and its order. Sometimes order can be relentless.
Part 3, Chapter 3
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Those are the worlds that end in our day-to-day lives, these stopped children, these annihilating losses, but at the end of Earth there will be actual, literal annihilation, hence the colonies. The first colony on the moon was intended as a prototype, a practice run for establishing a presence in other solar systems in the coming centuries. “Because we’ll have to,” the president of China said, at the press conference where construction on the first colony was announced, “eventually, whether we want to or not, unless we want all of human history and achievement to get sucked into a supernova a few million years down the line.”
Part 4, Chapter 1
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.
Part 4, Chapter 2
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“Can you explain it to me?” It was like being on the outside of a secret club, nose pressed to the glass.
Part 4, Chapter 2
“The simulation hypothesis? Yeah.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”
I’d been awake for two days and felt like I was dreaming. “Okay, but if we’re living in a computer, whose computer is it?”
“Who knows? Humans, a few hundred years into the future? An alien intelligence? It’s not a mainstream theory, but it comes up every so often at the Time Institute.” She opened her eyes.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.
Part 4, Chapter 3
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
If we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation? I took the trolley home from the university at three in the morning. In the warm light of the moving car, I closed my eyes and marveled at the detail. The gentle vibration of the trolley on its cushion of air. The sounds—the barely perceptible whisper of movement, the soft conversations here and there in the car, the tinny notes of a game escaping from a device somewhere. We are living in a simulation, I told myself, testing the idea, but it still seemed improbable to me, because I could smell the bouquet of yellow roses that the woman sitting beside me held carefully in both hands. We are living in a simulation, but I’m hungry and am I supposed to believe that that’s a simulation too?
Part 4, Chapter 4
How do you investigate reality? My hunger is a simulation, I told myself, but I wanted a cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers are a simulation. Beef is a simulation. (Actually, that was literally true. Killing an animal for food would get you arrested both on Earth and in the colonies.) I opened my eyes and thought, The roses are a simulation. The scent of roses is a simulation. “What would an investigation look like?” I’d asked her.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“But before you go, Gaspery, you might spend two years engaged in research. When you’re going to a given point in time, you’re there to investigate some specific thing, and you read up on everyone you expect to encounter. There are people at the Time Institute, hundreds of staff, whose entire job is researching long-dead people to compile dossiers for travelers, and your job is to study those dossiers until you know everything in them.” She stopped to drink. “So, Gaspery, picture this scene. You step into a party, at some long-ago point in time, and you know exactly how and when each and every person in that room is going to die.”
Part 4, Chapter 5
“That’s pretty creepy,” I admitted.
“And some of them are going to die in the most preventable ways, Gaspery. You might be talking to a woman, let’s say she has young children, and you know she’s going to drown at a picnic next Tuesday, and because you can’t mess with the time line, the one thing you absolutely cannot say to her is ‘Don’t go swimming next week.’ You have to let her die.” “You can’t pull her from the water.” […]
“The job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment,” she said finally. “Did I say almost? Not almost inhuman, actually inhuman.”
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“There are several things we’re looking for.” He was quiet for a moment. “The aspect of our work that relates to the anomaly is a continuing investigation into whether we’re living in a simulation.”
Part 4, Chapter 6
“Do you think we are?”
“There’s a faction,” he said carefully, “myself among them, that believes time travel works better than it should.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that there are fewer loops than one might reasonably expect. I mean that sometimes we change the time line and then the time line seems to repair itself, in a way that doesn’t make sense to me. The course of history should be irrevocably altered every single time we travel back in the time line, but, well, it isn’t. Sometimes events seemingly change to accommodate the time traveler’s interference, so that a generation later it’s as if the traveler were never there.”
“None of which is proof of a simulation,” Zoey said quickly.
“Right. For obvious reasons,” Ephrem said, “it’s difficult to confirm.”
“But you could move a step closer to confirmation by identifying a glitch in the simulation,” I said.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Zoey was waiting there, with a device that looked unnervingly like a gun.
Part 4, Chapter 9
“I’m going to shoot a tracker into your arm,” she said.
“Good morning, Zoey. I’m fine, thanks for asking. Nice to see you too.”
“It’s a microcomputer. It interacts with your device, which interacts with the machine.”
“Okay,” I said, giving up on pleasantries. “So the tracker sends information to my device?”
“Remember that time I gave you a cat?” she said.
“Of course. Marvin. He’s napping at home as we speak.”
“We sent an agent back to another century,” Zoey said, “but the agent fell in love with someone and didn’t want to come home, so she removed her own tracker, fed it to a cat, and then when we tried to forcibly return her to the present, the cat appeared in the travel chamber instead of her.”
“Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?”
“Your cat’s from 1985,” she said.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
In lockdown, there was a new kind of travel, but that didn’t seem the right word. There was a new kind of anti-travel. In the evenings Olive keyed a series of codes into her device, donned a headset that covered her eyes, and entered the holospace. Holographic meetings had once been hailed as the way of the future—why go to the time and expense of physical travel, when one could transport oneself into a strange silvery-blank digital room and converse there with flickering simulations of one’s colleagues?—but the unreality was painfully flat. Dion’s job required a great many meetings, so he was in the holospace six hours a day and was dazed with exhaustion in the evenings.
Part 5
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
Part 5
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“When we consider the question of why now,” Olive said, before a different audience of holograms the following evening, “I mean why there’s been this increased interest in postapocalyptic fiction over the past decade, I think we have to consider what’s changed in the world in that timeframe, and that line of thinking leads me inevitably to our technology.” A hologram in the front row was shimmering oddly, which meant the attendee had an unstable connection. “My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.”
Part 5
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.
Part 8 Chapter 9
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
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