Book Review: "Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel

 

4/5 stars

*Spoiler alert!*

Sea of Tranquility is one of those books that absolutely breaks your brain, but in the good way, where you come out of it with a different perspective of reality. I read Station Eleven and really enjoyed its TV adaptation, so it was a no-brainer to pick up Sea of Tranquility from the library. While a relatively small volume, the story punches well above its weight. So, it’s no surprise then that this book won in the science fiction category in the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards.

“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.”

Yes, Sea of Tranquility is a time travel adventure with plenty of pandemics, but it ultimately is about the nature of reality itself. This book runs with the idea of simulation theory, the idea that our universe and everything in it is just a program run on a very powerful computer. (Not to be confused with a similarly named and awesome Muse album.)

To be honest, simulation theory has always been something of an existential anxiety for me, alongside climate change. It’s weird, to put it mildly, that my body, the plant on my table, and all my loved ones are just computer-generated. And I happened to get this book after listening to a podcast episode about hyperobjects, which Oxford Reference defines as “an object or event whose dimensions in space and time are massive in relation to a human life.” Stuff like a black hole or climate change.

“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.” 

Not to mention the fact that Sea of Tranquility also perfectly described the disorienting shift in reality during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”

So, you can see why my brain has been broken and is slowly re-shaping itself into a slightly different configuration.

Readers are taken from 1912 Canada to 2112 and beyond, when in the 2400s time travel is invented, and chaos ensues. In the 2400s time detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is sent back in time to try and figure out what’s behind an anomaly that had a man in 1912 look up at a tree in Canada and simultaneously be in an airship terminal in 2112, where author Olive Llewellyn is passing through on her book tour and hears a violin being played by what appears to be a homeless man and sees the branches of a tree rise around her. There appears to be a glitch in the timeline and the Time Institute wants to know why.

“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.” 

Ultimately, as the story closed, I found my existential anxiety soothed by the fact that reality is subjective and scary and chaotic, but also beautiful and mysterious, no matter if it’s a simulation or not. There is a comfort to knowing you’re not at the center of an unfolding story, believe it or not.

Happy reading! 

--BookOwl