Title:

The Sea of Tranquility

Author:

Emily St. John Mandel

Category:

Fantasy / Science Fiction

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

December 22, 2023
was not much impressed with the much-hyped Station Eleven written by St. John Mandel, but there was so much positive press about The Sea of Tranquility that I bought into the praise and checked it out of the library. It is a better book than Station Eleven. NPR listed it has one of the best books of 2022. The Seattle Times wrote a glowing review for The Sea of Tranquility, as did The New York Times and Bookpage. Goodreads voted it the best science fiction book of 2022.

The Sea of Tranquility has an interesting plot, which is told in sections that step through time. It begins in 1912 with the tale of Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the youngest son of a British lord, who travels to Vancouver Island in Canada and witnesses a puzzling event. Edwin meets a curious character at the scene who is dressed as a priest and is named Roberts. The story jumps ahead to a swanky party in New York City in 2020, where Mirella is met by a gentleman named Gaspery Roberts who wishes to ask her about a video that she made while hiking on Vancouver Island years before - the video seemed to record a brief sort of glitch in reality. Mirella thinks Roberts looks a lot like a man she saw lying beneath an underpass years ago, when she was just a young girl and she happened upon shooting scene just before the police arrived - yet that was years ago, and Roberts doesn't appear to have aged a bit. The book leaps ahead again to 2203 and introduces us to Olive Llewellyn, an author from the lunar colonies who is on an extended book tour across Earth. Olive wrote a book which includes a scene that seems to describe a moment when reality was disrupted, and then resumed flowing along like normal. A eager fan named Gaspery Roberts wishes to talk to Olive and asks what inspired her to write that scene. Again the book leaps, this time to Colony One on the moon, where an aimless man named Gaspery Roberts works in a hotel as a security guard. Roberts has a brilliant sister, Zoey, who works at a mysterious place called the Time Institute. Roberts is intrigued by what he imagines is going on in that building, and gets involved in something that perhaps would have been better off left alone. I enjoyed these mysterious hints about an anomaly in our reality, and how Gaspery gets involved in trying to track down an explanation of what was happening.

But the Sea of Tranquility also exasperated me in that St. John Mandel made almost no attempt to imagine a future of wonder. The humans of the 25th century have time travel. They have faster-than-light travel - at one point, Gaspery Roberts wonders if he should emigrate to the Far Colonies around Alpha Centauri, implying he could cover the 4 lights years of space in much less than one lifetime. Civilization has robots that work the farms. The colonies on the moon have artificial gravity to make it feel like the surface of the Earth. Apparently, by the 25th century, the global-warming crisis will have passed - in one part of the story, the author Olive Llewellyn goes on an extended book tour, visiting coastal cities with no mention of any sea level rise or heat waves. Yet despite all of this technology, things seem very similar to how we live here in the 21st century. The main character, Gaspery Roberts, works as a security guard in a hotel on the moon?? Wouldn't a few cameras powered by AI algorithms provide better security? How come all of this tech exists, yet they lack the knowledge to stop a pandemic? Why not go forward into the future with the time machine and bring back the cure for the pandemic? So, lots of frustrating questions with regards to St. John Mandel's world building.

Overall, I think the plot was good enough to make The Sea of Tranquility a worthwhile read. The mystery of the anomaly kept the pages turning. The book is a fast read. It is the first one that I have read that deals with the question "Are we real, or are we all just a simulation?"