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"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 show more 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"--From the publisher's web site. show less

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Before starting [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227._SX50_.jpg|92408226], I did not expect it to be a sequel to [b:The Glass Hotel|45754981|The Glass Hotel|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1564199892l/45754981._SX50_.jpg|57817644]. I found it more satisfying than the previous novel, due to both settings and plot structure. Both novels are elegantly written and treat their central themes thoughtfully. [b:The Glass Hotel|45754981|The Glass Hotel|Emily St. John show more Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1564199892l/45754981._SX50_.jpg|57817644] is concerned with wealth, privilege, and class; [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227._SX50_.jpg|92408226] is concerned with the social and historical implications of pandemics. The two proceed in a non-linear fashion, although [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227._SX50_.jpg|92408226] has a more symmetrical nested structure that I liked, and follow characters with fleeting connections through vivid and distinctive locations. [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227._SX50_.jpg|92408226] is very much a novel of the COVID-19 years, yet deals with it obliquely by depicting other future pandemics. I appreciated the unsettling irony of an author discussing pandemics on her book tour while another one broke out. St John Mandel captures some of the anxiety of recent years neatly via the novel-within-a-novel 'Marienbad':

We knew it was coming and 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 the 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 towards us.

[...] 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 were still thinking in terms of getting work done. The most shocking thing in retrospect was the degree to which all of us completely missed the point.)


Also notable is the sequence of Marienbad's author commenting on the appeal of post-apocalyptic literature:

"I've heard a great many theories about why there's such interest in the genre. One person suggested to me that it had to do with economic inequality, that in a world that can seem fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over... [...] -and I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's an intriguing thought. [...] Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. [...] Some people have suggested to me that it's about the catastrophes on Earth, the decision to build domes over countless cities, the tragedy of being forced to abandon entire countries due to rising water or rising heat. [...] 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 it's ever been, that we have finally reached the end of the world."


I've given this topic a lot of thought myself and don't agree with Olive's conclusion here, although there is undoubtedly something to it. To my mind, the appeal of post-apocalyptic literature is a modern phenomenon. Based on my understanding of English literature, prior to the early 19th century ([b:The Last Man|966835|The Last Man|Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1392984325l/966835._SY75_.jpg|835097] (1826) is the earliest post-apocalyptic novel I've read) apocalypses were religious in nature and therefore eschatological is the more appropriate term. Authors began writing and readers began reading post-apocalyptic fiction when the idea dawned that humanity had the capacity to destroy ourselves, rather than it being purely a theological matter. I essentially agree with all three theories in the quote above: part of the appeal can be essentially narcissistic, a fantasy of simplicity and heroic survivalism. However, I also think that fictional apocalypses and post-apocalyptic worlds change based on ideology and historical period. In general, 21st century post-apocalyptic fiction reads to me as more violent and individualistic than that published during the Cold War and earlier.

Moreover, I suspect that the increasing popularity of the genre in recent decades is linked with anxiety about climate change and environmental destruction more generally. We all exist with the near-unbearable cognitive dissonance of daily lives that run on fossil fuels, while knowing that burning them is heating the world to unlivable extremes. I read [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227._SX50_.jpg|92408226] during an extreme heatwave. Maximum temperature records in the UK were smashed - England reached 40 degrees celsius for the first time ever recorded, Wales 37, and Scotland 35. For me, reading about futures that confront disaster and salvage something from it can hold comfort, or at least provide a means of processing feelings of horror and dread about climate change. I doubt I'm alone in this. I've noticed that as climate change becomes harder and harder for the wealthy world to ignore (although poorer countries have been suffering from extreme weather for much longer), apocalyptic disasters have crept into more and more literary fiction. Sometimes climate change directly, sometimes via allegories or fables. It's true that other historical eras have had good reasons to suppose that the end of the world was coming via war or pollution, but the science of climate change gives us more than enough reason to suppose the same. In the last two and a half centuries, capitalism has inexorably increased the destructiveness of technology towards the basic means of human subsistence. Breathable air, clean water, fertile soil, biodiversity, and a stable climate have steadily been sacrificed to capital accumulation. I generalise, but surely it's not surprising that awareness of this destruction would encourage the writing and reading of post-apocalyptic literature?

In any case, I found [b:Sea of Tranquility|58446227|Sea of Tranquility|Emily St. John Mandel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626710416l/58446227._SX50_.jpg|92408226] compelling, insightful, and adept in its handling of sci-fi concepts. The time travel sequences leave it a little ambiguous to what extent the timeline can ever be changed, which works well. I enjoyed the ingenious Twelve Monkeys-esque situation Gaspery found himself in and the essentially pointless debate about whether we live in a simulation. Would it actually change anything to discover that we did? Unless we also learned what was outside the simulation, I doubt it. I think [a:Emily St. John Mandel|2786093|Emily St. John Mandel|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1576606299p2/2786093.jpg] is going from strength to strength as a writer and look forward to her Edinburgh International Book Festival event.
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Emily St. John Mandel is the type of writer I trust enough to jump in and follow wherever she leads. And where she leads in her newest novel, Sea of Tranquility — futuristic space colonies, pandemics, time travel, simulation theory — may be slightly “deranged” to quote Mandel herself, but I still loved it. It contains all the things you expect from a Mandel novel — beautifully succinct writing, disconnected connectedness, glimpses of characters from other novels — as she tells a story that extends from 1912 to 2401 that at its heart is about belonging, loss, family, and loneliness. In a world full of overly long, plotless books about self-obsessed twenty-somethings, this felt like a revelation. It may be short--in one of the show more very meta sections the author character ruminates on whether she has written a novel or a novella--but Sea of Tranquility is still one of the best books of the year for me, and a must-read for Mandel fans and all readers of literary fiction. show less
½
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Did you ever finish a book and instantly feel jealous you weren’t the one to write it? Maybe it's just me but as I turned the last page of this novel, I felt bereft. Mandel weaves together characters and elements from her previous novels into a story that crosses time and worlds to give us an exploration on the meaning of existence, humanity and most importantly the value of life.

A traveller who seeks adventure yet is prone to inertia, a homesick author fatigued by her book tour, an inhabitant of a moon colony where the technology no longer works the way it was designed. What she weaves into the historic and futuristic landscapes is a feeling of normality in how mundane and human some show more experiences are so even when we are out of place with our own era we feel at home with her world.

Her characters are connected by a single moment, the sound of a violin, the Canadian wilderness, a Seattle airship terminal. One moment across centuries. How can it have happened and what does it mean?

One thing really striking is the way Mandel weaves pandemics into this story (something her previous work has not shied away from) a particular quote that I reread immediately…

“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.”

I know I will reread this one!
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10/10
This story sort of crept up on me, and then I found I couldn’t stop reading. So evocative. Such richly drawn characters; even if they are only in a few scenes, they seem very real to the reader. The author deftly weaves some deeply complex themes into the story and I will be thinking about them for some time.
Excellent—except someone needs to explain to the author, editor, and proofreader that “chai tea” (shudder) is a horrid redundancy, and for the sake of all Desi readers never never never do it again (and correct the paperback). Chapter 8, page 153, two mentions.

Aside from that, this was a marvelous book of incredible scope and ingenuity.
Emily St. John Mandel's new novel is a hard one to pigeonhole. It begins as a straight-forward historical novel about the second son of a prominent English family sent to Canada (a novel which I would have been quite happy to stay in, by the way), then changes to one set roughly near our own time and involving characters from [The Glass Hotel] (I was also happy to see these characters again, and from this slightly different angle) and finally a new story, one that will eventually, and wonderfully, draw all the threads together.

Yes, this is a novel about time travel, but it's also about people and hope and what joins us together. And it poses some interesting questions as it ranges through the centuries. Mandel writes so well about show more human emotions. She's playing with complex ideas and creating imaginative worlds, but really she's writing about people and the connections they make. And the answer to a question she asks in the book is really the only answer that can be given. I will be thinking about aspects of this novel for a long time. show less
½
Six-word review: Space-time dream shimmers in watercolor layers.

Sea of Tranquility is a beautiful novel. It has a certain mystical quality. Watching it unfold is not like watching an artist at work--Mandel's touch is too subtle for that--but like watching a wind-stirred diaphanous veil alternately conceal and reveal the landscape beyond. The prose is spare but not naked, just very carefully pruned: nothing superfluous, digressive, or self-indulgent. I can see a firm yet delicate hand trimming frills away.

The story is multilayered and multidimensional, yet it has a deceptive simplicity owing to the author's exquisite command of the language. Like a Japanese brush painting, her rendering of scenes and dialogue does more in a single show more sentence than many writers can achieve in paragraphs. You see one stroke and it conveys an entire image. Where in another author's hands I would see smoke and mirrors, in Mandel's I see expert control of her material with a light touch and a clear instinct for pacing and revelation.

The incorporation of a pandemic into the plotline affords some very relevant observations, notwithstanding the fact that in her narrative it occurs several centuries hence. Even beyond that, I find the author's exploration of classic what-if style conjectures both brilliant and stimulating.

She integrates intriguing philosophical questions, mostly in the voice of her fictional counterpart, novelist Olive Llewellyn. Some of those quotes are transcribed below.

I salute Mandel's courage in using the author as character. I have groaned many a time on meeting this trope in film and fiction, sometimes barely veiled as artist or musician, because it usually plays out as some sort of self-serving self-justification or, equally, self-mortification. Here, to the contrary, I believe she has broadened its dimensions even while anchoring it in the domain of mortal humanity.

A few choice excerpts:

"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." (page 116)

"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 in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it's clear that a pandemic is already here." (page 173)

"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. ... What if it always is the end of the world? ... Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never-ending process.” (pages 189-190)

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.” (page 191)

I gave it five stars, a rare rating in my scheme of things.
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Published Reviews

An ambitious time-travelling panorama of pandemics and parallel worlds
Alexander Theroux, Guardian
Apr 20, 2022
added by Dariah — edited by aprille
One of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet
Laird Hunt, New York Times (pay site)
added by Dariah — edited by aprille
Bold and exciting . . . Sea of Tranquility is Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet. Inventing and mind-bending
The Economist
added by Dariah

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Author Information

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Author
9+ Works 25,914 Members
Emily St. John Mandel was born in British Columbia, Canada. She is a staff writer for The Millions. She has written several novels including Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, The Lola Quartet, and Station Eleven. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 and Venice Noir. In 2015, her show more novel, Station Eleven, was on the New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 2015. In the same year she won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science-fiction writing for her novel Statio Eleven. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Emily St. John Mandel is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.

Some Editions

Lee, John (Narrator)
Moore, Dylan (Narrator)
Morey, Arthur (Narrator)
Potter, Kirsten (Narrator)
Weintraub, Abby (Cover designer)

Awards and Honors

Work Relationships

Common Knowledge

Canonical title
Sea of Tranquility
Original publication date
2022-04-05
People/Characters
Edwin St. John St. Andrew; Olive Llewellyn; Gaspery Roberts; Vincent Smith; Zoey Roberts; Paul Smith (show all 19); Reginald; Gilbert St. Andrew; Father Roberts; Louisa; Mirella Kessler; Vincent; Aretta; Dion; Talia Anderson; Natalia Anderson; Ephram; Clara; Miriam
Important places
British Columbia, Canada; Ohio, USA; Earth; Colony Two, the Moon; Night City, the Moon; Oklahoma City, USA (show all 16); Time Institute; Oklahoma City Airship Terminal; Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada; Colony One, the Moon; Atlantic Republic; Texas Republic; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Caiette, British Columbia, Canada; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Dedication
For Cassia and Kevin
First words
Edwin St. John St. Andrew, eighteen years old, hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic by steamship, eyes narrowed against the wind on the upper deck: he holds the railing with gloved hands, impatien... (show all)t for a glimpse of the unknown, trying to discern something--anything!--beyond sea and sky, but all he sees are shades of endless gray.
Quotations
Illness frightens us because it's chaotic. There's an aweful randomness about it. (p. 83)
But doesn't everything seem obvious in retrospect? (p. 92)
Was the death of the prophet in "Marienbad" too anticlimatic? It seemed possible ... -- but on the other hand, isn't that reality? Won't most of us die in fairly unclimatic ways, our passing unremembered by almost everyone, o... (show all)ur deaths becoming plot points in the narrative of the people around us? (p. 95)
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.... But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl.... "If he... (show all)r parents loved ," Meiying said, "it would have felt like the end of the world." (p. 103-104)
If we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation? (p. 129)
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, a... (show all)fter 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. (p. 189)
But what makes a world real? (p. 206)
... if definite proof emerges that we're living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be "So what". A life lived in a simulatio is still a life. (p. 246)
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I've been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in a ceaseless rush.
Publisher's editor
Jackson, Jennifer; Jonathan, Sophie; Lambert, Jennifer
Original language
English
Canonical DDC/MDS
813.6
Canonical LCC
PR9199.4.M3347

Classifications

Genres
Science Fiction, Fiction and Literature
DDC/MDS
813.6Literature & rhetoricAmerican literature in EnglishAmerican fiction in English2000-
LCC
PR9199.4 .M3347Language and LiteratureEnglishEnglish LiteratureEnglish literature: Provincial, local, etc.
BISAC

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Reviews
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Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
ISBNs
40
ASINs
9