Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

This was a Goodreads Choice Award winner last year in the Science Fiction Category.

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. 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 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. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that captures the reality of our current moment.

"Pandemics don't approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it's all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step. "

My Verdict

I was impressed with the author's ability to thoroughly develop three distinct time periods and do so effectively. She also surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters. The world is largely wiped out by that virus that emerges in the novel's central section. But as Olive reflects in one of the novel's most profound passages, such catastrophic erasures also happen every day. It's shocking, she thinks, 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 peace time, and by noon, your country is at war. You wake in ignorance, and by evening, it's clear that a pandemic is already here. I don't know how this would have affected me prior to being tossed into the middle of a global pandemic three years ago, but, that having been the case, this felt profound to me.

While this book is listed as a science fiction book, I thought is was more of a sci fi thriller. The science portion of it was not as completely developed as some.

"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."

One of the major themes is humanity and our unpredictable nature. How something that makes the most sense takes a turn for us in the moment. How we’re all faced with many different paths and our choices may lead us down to a place of destruction or reincarnation. Gaspery’s journey is very much like the ones we experience in our daily lives. We my not be traveling through time to solve anomalies in the timeline, but we are making the choices that affect not only our own lives, but the lives of people around us. It is actually a pretty uplifting story which surprised me since coming in all I knew was that it was a "pandemic story".

"No star burns forever."

My only complaint about the book is that I felt like the ending was underdeveloped and rushed and as a result it felt a bit contrived to me. I give this book 4.5 stars.