Bookquote.net Bookquote.net – Books Review and Quote site
Related Articles
| Categories | Science Fiction |
| Author | Emily St. John Mandel |
| Publisher | Random House Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (April 19, 2022) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 288 pages |
| Item Weight | 11.2 ounces |
| Dimensions |
6.07 x 0.77 x 9.17 inches |
I. Book introduction
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
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.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Editorial Reviews
“In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world’ and who one day might live well beyond.”
—Laird Hunt, The New York Times“Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel’s previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting—the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction’—to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction.”
—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker“‘Reality is things as they are,’ Wallace Stevens declared, and who could argue with that? Well, legions of philosophers and any number of novelists, among them Emily St. John Mandel, who, like an ingenious origami artist, seems determined with each new work to add yet another fold to our perception of what is real and one further twist to what we think of as time…Transcendent.”
—Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal“Mandel delivers…with an impish blend of wit and dread. The paradoxes of Gaspery’s adventure will be familiar to anyone who’s studied Jean Baudrillard or seen “Back to the Future.” But Mandel has the stylistic elegance and emotional sympathy to make this more than merely an undergraduate bull session. Absent your own time portal to the 1990s, it’s a chance to… wrestle with the mind-blowing possibility that what is may be entirely different from what we see.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post“Bold and exciting…Sea of Tranquility is Ms Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet (which is saying something). Inventive and…mind-bending, thanks to her disrupted timelines and fully realised vision of lunar settlements and parallel universes…Her depiction of a future pandemic is recognisable and touching…An illuminating study of survival and, in the words of one character, ‘what makes a world real.'”
—The Economist“Fusing sci-fi and great storytelling, this imaginative novel from the author of Station Eleven explores how technology might control our fate if we abandon compassion.”
—People Magazine“St John Mandel’s tender and idiosyncratic novel will undeniably make its own mark on its readers’ imaginations.”
—Alexander Larman, The Guardian“Mandel’s sensational sixth novel offers immense pleasures of puzzle box plotting and high-flying imagination… Masterfully plotted and deeply moving, this visionary novel folds back on itself like a hall of mirrors to explore just what connects us to one another, and how many extraordinary contingencies bring us to each ordinary day of our lives.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire“This story is really about the characters, survival, and human nature. You almost forget about the dystopian backdrop and the fact that the world may be ending and instead you focus on the beauty of the storytelling, the absorbing landscape, and the way these seemingly interconnected characters living in different time periods weave together.”
—Hannah Loewentheil, Buzzfeed“I didn’t just read Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, or Mandel’s latest, Sea of Tranquility. I lived in those novels and felt the remnants of their weird, chill atmosphere long after I had to move on…World builder is a phrase that’s rightly used to describe Mandel’s immersive powers as a novelist…Sea Of Tranquility is a poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters…Mandel is an important novelist of our moment, but doesn’t settle for merely replicating our moment. She inhabits it even as she sees beyond it.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air“There is both elegance and tenderness in Mandel’s narrative design…For her, science fiction allows us only enough escape from our context to let us regard it from a softening distance.”
—Sophia Nguyen, The Nation“Lovely, life-affirming…The project of Sea of Tranquility is about finding meaning and beauty within a world that is constantly dying, about relishing a life that seems always on the cusp of awful and irrevocable change…. Mandel’s prose is shot through with moments of unexpected lyricism…that take you by surprise with their limpid sweetness… Nourishing and needed. The world is always ending, this book says, and there is always beauty to be found in it.”
—Constance Grady, Vox“If there is one thing Emily St. John Mandel is going to do, it’s tell a story that’s so good that you’ll keep reading even though the plot includes pandemics and loss and the frightening future of the planet. St John Mandel’s swift storytelling and puncturing emotional truths will leave you wishing it was hundreds of pages longer. She remains an instant-buy writer.”
—Jenny Singer, Glamour“‘When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?’ asks a character in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility… At a time when that fear is so acutely alive, the question is revelatory. While Mandel focuses on many of the things that terrify us, she also illustrates how hope and humanity are flames that can never be fully extinguished.”
—Adrienne Gaffney, Elle“If you loved Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, you’ll devour this dystopian novel that’s about time travel and mystery as much as it is about love, the importance of family and how much our individual actions impact the world. With vivid and memorable characters, gorgeously imaginative settings and a plot that will have you gasping aloud, it ping-pongs from an eerie encounter in North America in 1912 to the anxiety of trying to escape a plague-ravaged Earth to moon colonies that feel at once just like home and far from it. This is a triumph of science fiction, so give it a try even if the genre usually leaves you cold.”
—Good Housekeeping“Terrible things happen in her books—worlds end, lives crash, large numbers of people die—but even as Mandel looks at these events without flinching, she also always finds a way to upend our usual takes on them…. Survival, she has suggested again and again, may depend more on one’s ability to love than on how well-appointed a fortress one’s bunker is….Mandel almost seems to be looking straight at the reader…asking us, in effect, to look beyond the spectacle of apocalypse to the long sweep of history. The point isn’t the end, because there isn’t a definitive end, just a series of endings. The point is what the people left do next.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, Oprah Daily“It is the human story that Mandel excels at portraying…Her writing on nature echoes a brutal solitude, the unease that comes when one ascends a mountain, crosses an expanse of golden plains, or finds themselves floating in space.”
—Nylah Burton, Shondaland“Mandel masterfully connects characters’ observations and senses within any given moment….Sea of Tranquility is…for anyone who wants to think about what the end of the world means, and how our lives matter in the face of it.”
—Megan Otto, Observer“Reading about a pandemic when the real world is still recovering from one would have been heavy going, were it not for the unerring grace of Mandel’s prose.”
—Olivia Ho, The Straits Times“A very knowing novel…Powerful…Very enjoyable…A book brimming with a sense of wonder, a sense of humour, and a sense for the weirdness we’ve all been experiencing over the last couple of years.”
—Ian Mond, Locus Magazine“I could write a thousand words about Emily St. John Mandel, and this book, and this moment but I won’t dare spoil it. Truly soul-affirming.”
—Emma Straub, best-selling author of All Adults Here“A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling – sci-fi with soul.”
—Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies“An emotionally devastating novel about human connection: what we are to one another—and what we should be.”
—Omar El Akkad, Scientific American“Each character alone could probably carry a book, and so could the picture — not rosy, but hardly hopeless — that Mandel paints of a future Earth…Generous with flashes of wry humor…Mandel’s style is distinctly her own, and she excels at bringing brightness out of the dark. Readers will leave Sea of Tranquility like Station Eleven before it, feeling hope for humanity.”
—Gail Pennington, St. Louis Post Dispatch“A full-on mind-blower. Inspired by real-world ills and eccentric philosophical theories, Mandel has crafted an enthralling narrative puzzle, plunging her relatable characters into a tale that spans five centuries.”
—Kevin Canfield, StarTribune“Mandel is an easy read…No matter where or when we touch down we feel at home in worlds much like our own….Which may be the point she’s getting at: we’re all, and will always be, part of a larger human story. In the face of pandemic or other catastrophes, all roads lead to home, whether those roads connect to the far edge of the Western world or the Far Colonies of space.”
—Alex Good, Toronto Star“This slim novel is written in a cool, elegant voice, like that of a singer who never wastes a note and who suggests strong emotion underneath her reserve.”
—Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel“Mandel’s writing is incredibly fluid and gripping and never failed to keep me reading.”
—Piper Coe, The Eastern Echo“In Mandel’s stunning latest, people find themselves inhabiting different places and times, from early 20th-century Canada to a 23rd-century moon colony… The novel’s narratives crystallize flawlessly. Brilliantly combining imagery from science fiction and the current pandemic, Mandel grounds her rich metaphysical speculation in small, beautifully observed human moments. By turns playful, tragic, and tender, this should not be missed.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred“A complicated and mysterious puzzle concerning the nature of reality solved perfectly, all loose ends connected… Even more boldly imagined than Station Eleven. Exciting to read, relevant, and satisfying.”
—Kirkus, starred“A time-travel puzzle… Mandel’s prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly… In the end, the novel’s interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love.”
—BookPage, starred“Sea of Tranquility is [Mandel’s] airship, offering readers a lifeline, and transporting them on a thrilling, wistful and memorable journey into the stars.”
—Jodé Millman, Booktrib“A thought-provoking novel that will pull readers in.”
—Melissa Flandreau, BookBub
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of April 2022: Sea of Tranquility surprised me, and it will likely surprise the most ardent Emily St. John Mandel fan. I mean that in a good way. The pristine writing is there, as is her ability to create intimate portraits at the same time she is addressing the big, essential questions of existence. But there’s a little more freedom to the writing. Emily St. John Mandel is a novelist who has written herself to a very high level. I won’t get too much into plot, but the book is told in multiple time periods, including the far future; there are characters who will be recognized from her previous work; and there is a pandemic angle that’s satisfying and well-told. Readers who have always really liked her work will likely fall in love after reading Sea of Tranquility (those in love will stay in love). If you haven’t read her work, think about picking up this one. I can’t wait to see what she does next. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel (born 1979) is a Canadian novelist and essayist. She has written numerous essays and six novels, including Station Eleven (2014) and The Glass Hotel (2020). Station Eleven, which has been translated into 33 languages, has been adapted into a limited series on HBO Max, which premiered on December 16, 2021. The Glass Hotel was translated into 20 languages and selected by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books from the year 2020. Her most recent novel, Sea of Tranquility, was published in April 2022 and debuted at number 3 on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Mandel was born in Merville, British Columbia, Canada to a Canadian mother, a social worker, and an American father, a plumber. St. John, her grandmother’s surname, is her middle name. She moved, with her parents and four siblings, to Denman Island off the west coast of British Columbia at the age of 10. She was home-schooled there until the age of 15, during which time she began writing daily in a diary, and left high school at 18 to study contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. She then lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York City.
After leaving The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Mandel worked with independent choreographers.
In 2002, in Montreal, Mandel began writing Last Night in Montreal.
Mandel was an administrative assistant at Anderson Center for Cancer Research at Rockefeller University.
Mandel is a staff writer for The Millions, an online magazine.
Mandel picked up a free newspaper in Toronto, read a book review and began corresponding with the author. Later, he became her boyfriend and they moved to New York City, where she met her husband.
II. [Reviews] Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel
| Here is a summary of the book Review “Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel“. Helps you have the most overview of the book without searching through time. Please access “BookQuote.Net” regularly or save it to keep track and update the latest information. |
1. MAGGIE STIEFVATER Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
A claustrophobic nautilus of a novel. The summary touts this as a time travel story but to me, it seemed less interested in time travel and more in a novelist’s wistful musings on the harrowing transformation from *a writer, quiet observer of the world*, to *a writer, performing being a writer*— on what it means for her identity and time to be consumed as well as her novels.
I understand why the summary lingers on time travel; there is plenty of it in this book. But to me the book really boils down to one scene, one moment: Olive, the writer, has to excuse herself from the hotel restaurant, where she is trying to charge her meal to her room, in order to ask the front desk to remind her what her room number is in this particular hotel, this particular city. She can’t remember, all times are one, all times are unreal. That is what this book is about.
2. NILUFER OZMEKIK Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
Breathtaking, mind blowing, complex, serene, intelligent!
Those are the first words pop into my mind when I finish the fascinating journey and one of the best books of 2022!
The main question of the book is not as simple as you may think.
What would you do when you find yourself in the middle of time corruption, a kind of unexplainable derangement where moments in time can corrupt one another?
Four people from different time zones felt the same anomaly and their fates intercepted at the same moment when Alan Sami plays violin the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal on 2200, thirteen years old Vincent in the woods of Caiette, northern Vancouver island in early 2000s to film the forest with her camera as Edwin St. John St. Andrew takes his long steps to the same woods in 1812 and the famous sci-fi author Olive Llewellyn walks in the platform of airship terminal in the same time line with Alan Sami performs the enchanting notes.
Both people feel the music and feel the forest, the background voices of platform and different qualities of their own time zones. But how this could be possible! What’s the reason behind the anomaly?
A man called Gaspery- Jacques Roberts starts connecting with this people asking questions about that moment they heard the violin. What they all felt? How could they visually transport themselves to different time zones?
Gaspery Jacques is also a character name belongs to Olive Llewellyn’s best selling novel. But how did she name her character with the same name of a man she’s never seen before?
Who is this Gaspery Jacques? Why he doesn’t get aged? What is his purpose to interrogate the people?
This book is marvelous symphony for my heart and soul! There are some great references of the author’s previous works: Station Eleven and Glass Hotel. And Olive Llewellyn might be reflection of the author who writes a pandemic book in the middle of the pandemic.
This is spectacular and I don’t know how much I can say more and scream loud to convince you to read it asap! Well, I highly advice you to read it asap! This is one of the best things I’ve truly devoured and enjoyed this year!
3. SUJOYA Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
“What it was like to leave Earth: A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.”
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Edwin St. Andrew finds himself crossing the Atlantic after being exiled by his aristocratic family in England on account of his disparaging remarks on colonialism at his family’s dinner table. His travels take him to Canada and eventually he lands in the settlement in Caitte. Here, one day while walking in the woods, he experiences “a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound” – an unnatural experience he shares in a letter to his family. In the summer of 1994, thirteen-year-old Vincent Smith is walking through the same woods recording her surroundings on video – a recording that her composer brother shares accompanied with his background score during a 2020 performance in New York City – a video that has a glitch- sudden darkness accompanied by violin music, a “whoosh” sound, a “dim cacophony”- that lasts a few moments. In the year 2203, an author by the name of Olive Llewellyn, a resident of the second moon colony, travels to Earth on a book tour to promote her post-apocalyptic novel, “Marienbad” which revolves around a pandemic. A passage in her novel describes one of her characters who, while traveling through Oklahoma City Airship Terminal stops to listen to a violinist and experiences “a fleeting hallucination of forest, fresh air, trees rising around him, a summer’s day”.
An anomaly? A glitch in a simulated reality? A file corruption? A break in reality? Are discrete realities bleeding into each other?
In the year 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a security professional employed with the Grand Luna Hotel in the first moon colony – is hired by the Time Institute and is assigned to investigate these unnatural occurrences . Gaspery travels back and forth through time and space , visiting and revisiting the people and the places, witnessing the mysterious events. He meets the son of the aristocrat, the brother and a close friend of the young girl who recorded the video and the author who admits her passage was based on an experience she had traveling through the same terminal. He also finds a fourth individual – the violinist Alan Sami whose music features in those visions. In the course of his travels, he comprehends the fragility of time travel and the ripples that any anomaly can create and finds it increasingly difficult to exercise the “almost inhuman level of detachment” that is required of him on his mission knowing that any manipulation of the timeline will bring with it dire consequences for himself.
A lot is going on in this relatively short novel (my ebook was 252 pages long) but the author’s narrative is structured such that it never feels rushed or too heavy. The author combines themes of time travel, life-threatening pandemics, space travel and other futuristic elements in a tightly woven narrative. The speculative /sci-fi elements are presented in a light and uncomplicated manner and strike a fine balance with the human element of the novel and the themes of family, survival, hope and humanity. Initially, the multiple threads of this novel may seem a tad disjointed, but the author does a marvelous job building up the suspense and brings everything together with a surprising revelation at the end. I also found the discussion (from the perspective of Olive Llewellyn) on the factors that influence the popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction quite interesting.
“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.”
I fell in love with Emily St. John Mandel’s writing after reading Station Eleven– a feeling that was reinforced after reading The Glass Hotel. Naturally, my expectations were high for Sea of Tranquility. With masterful storytelling , themes that resonate and concise and straightforward prose in a well-paced narrative that keeps you turning pages till the very end, Sea of Tranquility does not disappoint! There are references to events and characters from The Glass Hotel and Olive Llewellyn’s novel “Marienbad” appears to be similar to the author’s Station Eleven .Though I feel reading The Glass Hotel prior to this novel would enrich the reading experience, Sea of Tranquility can be enjoyed as a standalone novel for those who have not read The Glass Hotel . I was thrilled to receive a skip-the-line loan from my local library! I promptly set aside my other ‘current’reads and finished this book in a day. I know it is only April but I am confident that this novel will feature among my top 10 reads of 2022!
4. CATMANDU Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
“Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel” Satisfying and memorable
This time-travel novel from award-winning Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel stands head-and-shoulders above other recent literary novels in this genre. It is both a fun and satisfying mystery, with all the temporal conundrums and surprises you could wish for, and a beautiful meditation on time, reality and humanity. It is also a pandemic novel, but thankfully it is neither sensational nor sentimental. Mandel reflects delicately and thoughtfully on the deep questions raised by the pandemic, weaving them into her jaunts through time. Not all the periods she takes us to are equally successful. The 23rd century book tour, while fun, felt very much like a 21st century book tour. But the wilds of 1912 Canada and the lunar Night City of the 25th century are beautifully evoked. The writing is both graceful and efficient, meaning you can almost read this in a day. And you will want to, because it very quickly becomes completely gripping. I could not put this down.
5. RLP Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
Another devastatingly beautiful novel by Emily St. John Mandel
When one takes into account the breadth of her setting both in terms of time and space, it is remarkable that this book is as compact, intricate and focused as it is. Considering it spans nearly 500 years, two planetary bodies and a potentially complicated narrative structure involving time travel, the fact that the work never feels anything other intimate and personal is a majestic feat of restraint.
I loved Station Eleven, but was cooler on The Glass Hotel although I did thoroughly enjoy it. This surpasses Station Eleven and brilliantly gives new life to The Glass Hotel by interweaving it’s narratives and characters into this book. If you’ve read The Glass Hotel this feels like a semi-sequel, but also does completely stand alone from it. If you haven’t read The Glass Hotel, don’t worry it’s not in any way a necessity, but I recommend you visit it afterward. Having read Sea Of Tranquility I felt like my experience of The Glass Hotel was suddenly elevated and I will be revisiting it very soon to savour the connections which had yet to be written when I first read it.
I have a soft spot for any story that resembles clockwork in the way the narrative fits, slots and rotates about itself to neatly bring itself to a meaningful conclusion, and this book is the ultimate expression of that form. I was constantly reminded of the books of David Mitchell, particularly Cloud Atlas, not in the sense that there is any sense of replication here but that there is a similar sense of completion, of a rounding out and fulfilment to the journey that has been taken.
Within it’s pages it tackles a breathtaking number of philosophical questions. These range from the validity and importance of Simulation Theory, the ethical ramifications of time travel, the seemingly impossible and everlasting battle between bureaucracy and humanity and the inability of the two to coexist, and the importance of constancy of character within the separately fluid nature of our lives.
All of this is bound up with a story that feels semi-autobiographical to the author, one grounded in our recent experience of the pandemic that feels raw but never overly exploited. There is a lot going on but nothing feels out of place or extraneous.
At the moment of writing this review, this is my favourite book. I hope that this assessment travels with me into whatever the future or past might bring.
6. NANCY ADAIR Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
I loved this new time-skipping sci-fi novel with it’s subtle mystery. But it’s the message that most affected me. Consider this statement from character Olive, a novelist: “…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.”
It gives me chills of recognition.
7. CHARLOTTE MAY Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
Man. I really loved this 💖
An epic novel in less than 300 pages!
We follow several characters in different timelines, from 1912 when Edwin St Andrew makes the trip from England to British Columbia to begin a new life, an author 2 centuries later travelling on her book tour across Earth.
Both characters have one thing in common, they have experienced a strange phenomenon. A break in the universe. Edwin, when he was in a forest beneath a maple tree, but heard a violin playing and a strange whoosh noise. The author, Olive Llewelyn when in an airship station on one of the moon colonies – having a flash of a forest in the middle of nowhere.
Gaspery- Jacques Roberts, is a time traveller. Hired to look into this strange phenomenon and perhaps work out what caused it.
Now, I don’t do time travel ever. So the fact that I enjoyed this as much as I did speaks volumes to the authors writing. She describes things in such a way I felt included and I understood what she was saying. This rarely happens for me with time travel in books.
Overall, this was a beautiful story, blurring the lines between time and space. I was entranced and gripped – this is definitely a book I will return to again.
“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story…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.”
************************
When my library order isn’t available but I walk in and it’s just sitting on the shelf!
8. JENNA Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
How would we know if we’re living in a simulation? Could we even know?
The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostram posited that one of the following must be true:
- All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities;
- If any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or
- Advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.
If number three is correct, we’re probably living in a simulation. We could all just be Sims characters playing out in some pimply teenager’s computer program.
(Disclaimer: I don’t know for sure if alien teens get acne, but until we see them, they both do and don’t have acne. Or something like that, right, Shrodinger?)
Ever since I first read about the simulation hypothesis, I’ve enjoyed thinking about it. What or who is this “god” that created the digital universe we live in, our pixelated selves, everything we know and feel and think is real?
For some reason, considering the simulation hypothesis makes the negative things in life seem not quite as important. Maybe they feel like they’re real and so it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not, but at the same time, it does my worrying brain a lot of good to think in this way.
Emily St. John Mandel has written a gorgeous novel considering the possibility of a simulated universe. It is imaginative, fun, and philosophical.
The characters, living centuries apart, come to life in Mandel’s lyrical prose. They might or might not be simulations, but they are every bit as real as fictional characters can seem.
There are some fabulous twists that left my brain reeling, but it is not an “action” type of story. It’s very much character-driven and introspective.
It’s more “science-fictiony” than Mandel’s previous novels, with time travel and human colonies on the moon and Titan, but I wouldn’t call it science fiction because there really isn’t any science.
I won’t say more; you can read the blurb if you’re interested… this is a rare case where the GR blurb of the book is more than sufficient — and accurate.
If you enjoy speculative fiction, the simulation hypothesis, or just beautiful and well-written novels, this is the book for you. It’s a quick read at only 255 pages, but wow is there a lot of story in those few pages!
“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.”
9. HANNAH Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
I have not been able to stop thinking about this book but at the same time I have trouble putting my thoughts and feelings into words. This is brilliant. I knew very little going into this book except that I will read anything Emily St. John Mandel writes and as such the book surprised me again and again. It is losely connected to her most recent two novels, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, and I love her extended universe so much. She does this better than David Mitchell, whose writing I also adore, and I cannot wait to read whatever comes next. This book is both perfectly structured and compulsively readable, and as always her characterwork is beyond compare. So yes, I loved this.
I received an ARC of this book courtesy of Edelweiss and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
10. KRISTA Review Sea of Tranquility: A novel
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.
Sea of Tranquility is my favourite Emily St. John Mandel so far: more playful than her previous novels, I found this to be meaningful and thought-provoking while absolutely capturing the experience of living through the Covid-19 pandemic. Some characters from The Glass Hotel make a return and, metafictionally, Station Eleven is referenced (as a stand-in for Mandel herself is asked what it’s like to see her pandemic novel, Marienbad, resurge in popularity during an actual pandemic), and the whole feels like a David Mitchellesque über-project; Mandel is on her way to creating an epic here. On its own, this volume might feel a bit slight (it only takes a few hours to read), but for what it adds to the overall project, and for what it captures of our times, I am rounding up to five stars; it’s a perfect little gem. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The following might be slightly spoilery as I attempt to note enough detail for my own future use (but not more spoilery than the publisher’s blurb).
He steps forward — into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound — When he returns to his senses he’s on the beach, kneeling on hard stones, vomiting.
The novel begins in 1912 and eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John St. Andrew is exiled to Canada after, mystifyingly, voicing some audacious opinions at his parents’ dinner party (Including: evidence suggests the people of India feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat; and: the family’s remote forefather William the Conqueror had been naught but “the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider”), and after hopscotching ever-westward through Halifax, Saskatchewan, Victoria, and finally landing in a small community further up the coast of Vancouver Island, Edwin has an out-of-body-to-blackout experience in the forest that leaves him spooked and shaken. An oddly-accented man posing as a priest wants to question Edwin, but the stranger runs away when the real priest turns up.
The next chapter jumps ahead to the year 2020 and a composer is showing an audience the strange video that his sister (Vincent Alkaitis from The Glass Hotel) once took of a forest clearing near her hometown on Vancouver Island; the same clearing that Edwin had entered, the video cutting to black after the same out-of-time violins-and-hydraulics sound experience that Edwin had encountered. In the audience that night and wanting to speak with the composer, Paul, are: a fawning fanboy in oversized clothing, Mirella — an old friend of Vincent’s, hoping to track her down — and a man with a strange accent who, incredibly, may have crossed paths with Mirella when she was a child. But why hasn’t he aged since then?
We knew it was coming. We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children — and ourselves — in the decades that followed. We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways — “Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness — Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us.
Jump ahead to 2203 and author Olive Llewellyn is visiting Earth from her moon-based colony on a book tour for the earliest of her three novels — receiving renewed interest in light of its imminent film adaptation — and as she fields the same boring and sexist questions worldwide, all while missing her husband and daughter back home, she is aware of the mounting irony of promoting a pandemic novel (about a “scientifically implausible flu”) while the news warns of a mysterious new virus. And who is the interviewer with the odd accent who wants to know about that one strange scene in her novel — a vision of trees accompanied by the strain of violins and launching airships — set in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal?
No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.
The next chapter is set in 2401, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts (named for a character in his mother’s favourite book, Marienbad) is a listless thirty-something, drifting through life in a moon colony after the breakup of his marriage and the recent death of his mother. When his sister — a brilliant scientist who works for the secretive Time Institute — shows him an old video that she finds disturbing (the same video of the trees overlaid with violins and airships that Vincent had recorded as a teenager), Gaspery is intrigued to distraction. What he and his sister can’t quite work out from their vantage in the high-tech future is: Has this video captured a glitch in simulated reality? Is it an anomaly created by a paradox-causing time traveller? Is it a supernatural event meant to warn of the End of Days? What if time travel is real and Gaspery can train to go back in time and interview the key players related to the video? Better work on that accent; it’s bad enough that Gaspery hasn’t been taught cursive or Shakespeare.
HR is bureaucracy. As is the Time Institute. The premier research university on the moon, possessor of the only working time machine in existence, intimately enmeshed in government and in law enforcement. Even one of those things would imply a formidable bureaucracy, don’t you think? What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self- protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.
There’s so much in here about the nature of reality — even Mirella works at a tile store that specialises in simulated stone that’s indistinguishable from the real thing; it might be this stone that is eventually used to build the moon colonies — and those domed colonies, with their projected Earth skies and artificial weather systems, are meant to simulate life on Earth. If we are living in the Matrix, as some of the characters muse, and we believe the simulation, then the simulation is reality. But all worlds — civilisations, planets, computer-generated simulations — eventually end; even Edwin grows sympathetic to his mother’s grief over the ending of the Raj system in India which she had grown up under. So can the Time Institute be blamed for being ruthless in its aim to protect the timeline from glitches? This is the question at the heart of the plot.
As a stand-in for Mandel, I loved the character of Olive Llewellyn as she patiently fields questions on her book tour (Did that woman just say it was kind of Olive’s husband to care for their child while she was on tour? Is this what Mandel faced on her last book tour as Covid began?) I appreciated Olive’s answer about why people like dystopian fiction:
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.
And I loved that through Olive, Mandel was able to explain why the book she wrote during the pandemic lockdown was a departure into sci-fi:
“I don’t mean to be melodramatic, and I know it’s like this in a lot of places now, but there’s just, there is so much death. There’s death all around us. I don’t want to write about anything real.” The journalist was quiet. “And I know it’s like this for everyone else too. I know how fortunate I am. I know how much worse it could be. I’m not complaining. But my parents live on Earth, and I don’t know if . . .” She had to stop and take a breath to compose herself. “I don’t know when I’ll see them again.”
Mandel was in this uniquely ironic position of having her pandemic-themed novel surge in popularity during a pandemic (Olive drily notes that she doesn’t bring her royalty reports to meetings when an interviewer wants to know specifics about sales numbers), and this book that she wrote during the lockdown not only describes what that experience was like for her as a writer (Olive hoards supplies, feels restless and confined, and needs to juggle home-schooling and work like so many other parents) but she also smoothly interprets and inserts this experience into her larger project. This isn’t reportage, this is art; and I loved it.
III. [Quote] Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel
The best book quotes from Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel
“Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”
“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.”
“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”
“It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”
“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”
“A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”
“There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
“If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”
“Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”
“When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?”
“The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
“No star burns forever.”
“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.”
“It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?”
“You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.”
“The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.”
“Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.”
“What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”
“You should have told me my cat was a time traveler.”
“—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.”
“Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?”
“Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.”
“You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”
“A life of solitude could be a very pleasant thing.”
“We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies—just in case—but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home?”
“We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it.”
“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.”
“The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed.”
“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.”
“Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
“Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?” “Your cat’s from 1985,” she said. “What,” I said, at a loss for words.”
“Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”
Book excerpts: Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel
1
No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.
Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren’t annihilating. A year before I began my training at the Time Institute, I went to a dinner party at my friend Ephrem’s place. He was just back from a vacation on Earth, and he had a story about going on a walk in a cemetery with his daughter, Meiying, who was four at the time. Ephrem was an arborist. He liked to go to old cemeteries to look at the trees. But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl, Ephrem told me, and he just wanted to leave after that. He was used to graveyards, he sought them out, he’d always said he didn’t find them depressing, just peaceful, but that one grave just got to him. He looked at it and was unbearably sad. Also it was the worst kind of Earth summer day, impossibly humid, and he felt like he couldn’t get enough air. The drone of the cicadas was oppressive. Sweat ran down his back. He told his daughter it was time to go, but she lingered by the gravestone for a moment.
“If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”
It was such an eerily astute observation, Ephrem told me, that he stood there staring at her and found himself thinking, Where did you come from? They got out of the cemetery with di!culty—“She had to stop and inspect every goddamn flower and pinecone,” he said—and never went back.
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.”
I watched footage of that press conference in my sister Zoey’s o!ce, three hundred years after the fact. The president behind the lectern with her o!cials arrayed around her, a crowd of reporters below the stage. One of them raised his hand: “Are we sure it’s going to be a supernova?”
“Of course not,” the president said. “It could be anything. Rogue planet, asteroid storm, you name it. The point is that we’re orbiting a star, and all stars eventually die.”
“But if the star dies,” I said to Zoey, “obviously the Earth’s moon goes with it.”
“Sure,” she said, “but we’re just the prototype, Gaspery. We’re just proof of concept. The Far Colonies have been populated for a hundred and eighty years.”
2
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.
There was substantial interest in immigration to the colony. Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding or heat. The colony’s architects had set aside space for substantial residential development, which sold out quickly. The developers lobbied successfully for a second colony when they ran out of space in Colony One. But Colony Two was built a little too hastily, and within a century the lighting system on the main dome had failed. The lighting system was meant to mimic the appearance of the sky as viewed from Earth—it was nice to look up and see blue, as opposed to looking up into the void—and when it failed there was no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue. Which is not to suggest that there wasn’t light, but that light was extremely unearthlike: on a bright day, the colonists looked up into space. The juxtaposition of utter darkness with bright light made some people dizzy, although whether this was physical or psychological was up for debate. More seriously, the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-four-hour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there were two straight weeks of night.
The cost of repair was deemed prohibitive. There was a degree of adaptation—bedroom windows were outfitted with shutters, so people could sleep during the nights when the sun was out, and street lighting was improved for the days without sunlight— but property values declined, and most people who could a!ord it moved to Colony One or the recently completed Colony Three. “Colony Two” drifted out of common parlance; everyone called it the Night City. It was the place where the sky was always black.
I grew up in the Night City. My walk to school took me past the childhood home of Olive Llewellyn, an author who’d walked those same streets two hundred years ago, not too far out from the moon’s first settlers. It was a little house on a treelined street, and I could tell that it had been pretty once, but the neighborhood had gone downhill since Olive Llewellyn had been a child there. The house was a wreck now, half the windows covered up and gra”ti everywhere, but the plaque by the front door remained. I paid the house no attention, until my mother told me she’d named me after a peripheral character in Marienbad, Llewellyn’s most famous book. I didn’t read the book—I didn’t like books—but my sister Zoey did and reported back: the Gaspery-Jacques in the book wasn’t anything like me.
….
Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!
| The above content has been collected from various sources on the internet. Click the Share button to recommend the book to your friends! |
BookQuote.Net Sincerely Introduced!
