Sea of Tranquility
By Emily St. John Mandel
- Genre
- Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780593321447
Spanning from 1912 Vancouver Island to a lunar colony centuries in the future, Sea of Tranquility follows characters linked by a strange recurring moment, a glitch that hints at the nature of reality. A detective in the far future investigates the anomaly across time. Emily St. John Mandel's...
A young English exile in 1912, a novelist on a pandemic book tour, a resident of a far-future moon colony: Emily St. John Mandel gathers characters separated by centuries and binds them with a single uncanny moment - a flicker in a forest, a snatch of violin, a hint that reality may not be what it seems. Sea of Tranquility is a compact, elegant time-travel novel that doubles as a meditation on the very anxieties Mandel explored in Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel: mortality, contingency, and how to live when the ground beneath certainty gives way. A time-traveling investigator ties the threads together, but the book wears its science fiction lightly, more interested in feeling than mechanism. Mandel's prose is clean and quietly resonant, her structure precise, and the whole thing reads with deceptive ease for a novel juggling centuries. It even folds in a sly, self-aware strand about writing a pandemic novel during a pandemic. For readers who like their speculative fiction spare, humane and philosophically curious, it is a small gem.