Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel
★★★★★ 4.5/5
Science Fiction
Time travel does not make a book Sci Fi
I picked this book up late in the year when Goodreads readers voted this the #1 Sci Fi book of 2022. And unlike the Goodreads 2022 mystery winner The Maid, my previous disappointing read, this one held up to my expectations of a top 2022 book.
My first thought on finishing Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was how similar the experience of reading this book was, to the also excellent Version Control by Dexter Palmer. Both books deal with time travel but don’t read like conventional science fiction. Time travel is merely a construct that both authors employ to tell a story touching several and very human themes. So while I enjoyed this book, it wasn’t for or because of the sci-fi. It’s just really well written. And you know that’s the case when you pause mid page to make a note of a well crafted passage or astute observation—which I did several times. Another similarity this books shares with Version Control
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.
Expansive story 1912 – 2401 CE:
There are four threads to this expansive story, each set in a different century: one in the early twentieth century, another in the present and the remaining two in the future. But it’s not just expansive in time but also Space: the futuristic storylines have humans settled on the Moon as well as other moons in the Solar System.
The story begins in 1912 with a young British lad exiled in Canada having fallen out of favor with his aristocratic parents, but surviving on a healthy remittance from home. This young man experiences something inexplicable in the forest—an aural experience with music and other sounds entirely alien to his circumstances and time! An experience so truly out of this world that he questions his own sanity. This paranormal experience connects the storylines with a time traveling investigator attempting to get to the bottom of this anomaly.
Intriguing and well constructed:
The anomaly combined with time travel effectively provides intrigue and sci-fi in the story and also connects the disparate lives in disparate times. The storylines however are assembled unevenly, in more ways than one.
First, the characters in the story are not all developed to the same extent. This unevenness is surprising and perhaps even jarring: it is not always clear (at least to me anyway) why particular facets of a character’s life are described. For example, the ill conceived diatribe at the dinner table, that results in the expulsion of the English lad (who first encounters the anomaly) is written splendidly ( I read that passage multiple times), but ultimately has little bearing on the main plot.
“Sometimes you don’t know you are going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin”
Then there are the worlds of the future. Some reviews describe the massive world building Ms. Mandel engages in with this story. But that’s not true. Her writing, while immersive, is not really world building in the sci-fi connotation. The futuristic civilization on The Moon is only cursorily described. Andy Weir’s excellent Artemis is an example of Lunar world building.
There are also several themes explored to varying levels of detail: how real is our existence? What truly matters in life? And should that change if we were to know our existence was unreal and only simulated? How much responsibility do we bear for our own lives and those we care about? Are we bound to help those in immediate danger even if it’s at some larger cost to humanity? A civilization altering pandemic also features in one of the storylines (Station 11 redux?)
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.
But this unevenness is not really a problem because Ms. Mandel is such an engaging storyteller. It is still a delight to read well forged passages even if they aren’t seemingly accretive to the larger story. And most importantly, she ties up the main plot fairly well in a poignant ending.
Overall
An enjoyable read, that partially redeems the Goodreads choice award list after my last poor experience with The Maid.
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