Sea of Tranquility

               

Title: Sea of Tranquility

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Published: Vintage, April 5, 2022

Pages: 290

Genre: Sci-Fi

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. 

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. 

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

Whoa. This felt almost low-key sci fi. Like it certainly wasn't full on space opera. But the way that the science fiction was woven through the story was so seamless and lovely. You have anomalies, simulation theory, time travel, moon colonies, and oh so many pandemics. I mean there was actual time travel and it felt low key sci fi to me. That sentence is such a contradiction, but I can't help but stand by it.

It's unsurprising that epidemics throughout the ages is a theme at the forefront of this novel. We've all been working through the complex PTSD of our most recent pandemic, right? In our own ways. Whether it's to chalk it up to a conspiracy, hoax, or actually grieving our loved ones. So seeing and reminding ourselves that this isn't the first pandemic, and certainly won't be the last, is cathartic in a way. 

Gaspery-Jacques has a distinctive name. So distinctive that when he meets the author that imagined it and put it in her book a century before his birth, she was shocked to meet someone with that name in real life. Or are they just in a simulation? Gaspery is a man living on the Moon in, I believe, the 23rd century. His sister works for the time institute, and somehow he gets wrapped into an investigation on an anomaly where it seemed like a bunch of time streams crossed for a moment over the ages. He's sent throughout time to talk to the various people who were documented in the historical record as being involved in this anomaly. 

Reading Gaspery and his sister's discussions about the time stream and simulation theory and such was really interesting. They're very interesting concepts academically, and then they discuss how humanity and empathy and compassion impact the concepts and it's riveting. I highly recommend.

Ratings

Stars: 4/5