Sea of Tranquility

By far my favorite Emily St. John Mandel.

There's an inherent meta quality to this novel that makes it feel different from the rest of her work. In the wake of the popularity of Station Eleven and then the follow-up, The Glass Hotel, which was perhaps more divisive among readers, this book was more of an examination of how the author is coping with writing a book about a deadly pandemic just a few years before an actual deadly pandemic hits and having that book become not just successful, but almost oppressively so.

St. John Mandel's followup, The Glass Hotel, was, in a lot of ways, a more interesting book to me. More of a contemplative piece about greed, human nature and the difficult of just existing. Not to say Station Eleven wasn't about those things as well, but there are readers who see things through different lenses, not that of theme but tropes.

There were readers disappointed that The Glass Hotel wasn't another post-apocalyptic book, that it wasn't giving them a similar story, if not a follow-up. As an author, it's difficult to not internalize these things.

Certain ‘spoilers' follow.

Sea of Tranquility features a prominent author, Olive, in the future who wrote a book about a deadly pandemic and was on a book tour promoting said book because of an upcoming film adaptation of it, while a deadly pandemic was blossoming in a part of the planet. This author lives in a colony on the moon and spends ample time throughout her sections feeling dislodged from reality while traveling from hotel to hotel.

Hotels play a big role in St. John Mandel's work here, huh?

There are gonna be folks that label Sea of Tranquility as a time travel novel, which is perhaps fine. There is time travel elements involved here, namely a character named Gaspery who worked as a hotel security guard (cough) until his sister, an agent at the Time Institute (the same Time Institute that the author stand-in's husband was helping design) who has a theory that certain glitches appearing in different points in history prove simulation theory, where they are living in a computer simulation. It was something Zooey and Gaspery's mother deeply believed. I should note that Gaspery is named after a character from Olive's work.

Gaspery isn't introduced as a point of view character until the second half of the book, with him appearing throughout the first half as a strange figure to the different characters, including Edwin St. Andrew, a British expat in Canada after going on a tirade about the ill-effects of colonialism and his family essentially kicking him to the curb. He has a hallucination in the woods in Caiette. Yes, that Caiette, where Vincent from the Glass Hotel, filmed a video her brother used for a visual art piece, including a strange “glitch.”

Gaspery appears to Andrew masquerading a priest, asking him about what he saw in the woods.

Gaspery also appears as an interviewer with Olive when she's on her book tour, meets with Vincent's brother and old friend and we're all sort of in a churn here with the characters from The Glass Hotel.

The first half of the book establishes the importance of The Glass Hotel and its cast of characters, as well as Olive and her Station Eleven-ish work, on top of her mounting fear of the encroaching pandemic. All throughout, we see Gaspery and it's unclear as to why.

When we find out later he's a time traveler tasked with uncovering the mystery of these glitches, including interviewing a violinist in a futuristic Oklahoma City airship terminal, that same violin music present in each instance of someone encountering the “glitch,” things get more complicated.

Gaspery's job is to gather data and investigate, not interfere. But he does. Because his humanity won't let him meet with Olive and know the pandemic will kill her days later, or Andrew, depressed after his time at war, meets his own untimely demise. This causes a ripple effect where the Time Institute frames him for a murder in the past, sends him to prison to rot, but his sister instead gets him to somewhere he'll be safe... where, and this is all a spoiler or whatnot, he becomes the old man violinist with a surgically altered face so the Time Institute won't find him.

It's not a simulation, it's just Gaspery intersecting with himself in time multiple times over in the same place.

But that's just the plot, right? What's interesting to me is what this all means.

I've read other reviews that are disappointed with St. John Mandel's return to talking about a pandemic, which is ironic considering The Glass Hotel received a lot of praise, but also a lot of criticism for not following in Station Eleven's footsteps. In a way, it almost proves the exact point of this book. Actually, it does.

What does it mean to be an artist who has always existed within their own space, allowed to work as they wish and create different kinds of work, only to become successful and suddenly people want more of the same from you? There are passages where Olive is running through criticisms of her books in her head that come from readers, critics and interviewers, about how her endings aren't impactful enough, or how certain characters don't meet certain expectations, or how certain tropes weren't present and so on. She's on a book tour for a book that she wrote a while ago, only popular again because of a film adaptation (cough Station Eleven on HBO cough) and, well... you get the picture.

Many of the “problems” readers expressed with The Glass Hotel were revisited here, although key mysteries (like what happened to Vincent) are never addressed (thankfully!). This was an entire work about the literal impact of fictional characters on the real world, about the inability to change the past and the conflicts an artist creates for themselves throughout their career.

... written during a pandemic by an author who studied pandemics to write a very popular novel about a pandemic.

An author who feels like she's from the fucking moon, witnessing people make the same mistakes from history and feels powerless to make any sort of positive impact on anyone because people are nitpicking not the stuff that matters to her about her work; the characters, the themes and the messaging, but the surface level.

I love it.

I've been hoping for Emily St John Mandel to impress me again after I really loved Station Eleven, but both this book and The Glass Hotel have been just totally fine.

Ultimately I just wasn't totally gripped by the story. I'll keep things vague, but I'm a sucker for this type of story and I like a lot of what's done with the setting and time period, however there are also a bunch of clumsy and trite elements to it. There's also a self-insert character for the author here that felt really awkward.

There are still a lot of neat ideas here and I just enjoy the way Mandel writes, so I'm glad to have read it.

This book is a solid 3-3.5 for me. Maybe a 3.7 if you're rating the performances from the audiobook.

I was a little disappointed with how the book panned out. As far as the story goes, Sea of Tranquility didn't bring anything new or meaningful to the table for me to engage with :( And while that isn't a problem in and of itself, it lacked emotional and character depth to make up for it. It's a shame that we spend TEN chapters getting to know a character, only for him to be dropped for the rest of the book.

As simple as the book was, there were enough times I found myself confused. I'll admit that sometimes the questions I get stuck on are ones that are irrelevant, but its hard to suspend my disbelief when a book practically surrounds a decision that in my view, makes no sense if we know nothing about this character. Why does Gespery save Olive? Up until that point he's essentially asocial and there's no indication that he's a sensitive or emotional person. I'm not disagreeing with his decision, but there's not enough for me to buy it (especially considering his supposed dedication to his new line of work!!) We don't even see him wrestle. On top of that, the anomaly only exists because Gespery went back in time to investigate said anomaly. But why would he go back to investigate if the anomaly hadn't already existed? I'll let you get away with not explaining time travel, but I need you to explain that.

The book should've just been on Edwin.

I find time travel stories hard to enjoy because my brain goes into overdrive thinking about the various loops and dependency chains, etc, but this was pretty enjoyable! The soft-sci-fi-ness was a nice change of pace for me and it felt extremely easy – read the whole thing on a single flight. I love the cat.

What a ride! This was mind-bending and kept me guessing. One of those time travel things that immediately wants to make you start the book over once you've gained new perspective. It's a great example of modern sci-fi - very human, the fantastic future tech is there but in the background in service of the character-driven narrative. Seems very filmable. I hope someone is working on the major motion picture.

part semi-sequel. part autofiction. part huh????? the disjointed method of telling this story didn't really work, even with me knowing that it was always gonna bring itself back together eventually. i enjoyed every individual section, for as brief as they were, but the most interesting part of the book didn't come until the last third and makes me wonder how great this could've been if that was the main focus all along.

We might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never-ending process.

I will bow down forever at the altar of Emily St. John Mandel's increasingly dense and interconnected worlds. Many of which contain pandemics. And always art.

Two favorite pieces:

Cool unspoken plot point: In this stimulation, with the glitches wrought by interventionism in time travel, Jonathan Alkaitis does not spend the rest of his days in a minimum security prison; he escapes to Dubai as he dreamt of doing in The Glass Hotel.I didn't expect to be haunted by Edwin in 1912 because I found the beginning of the book a bit slow. But man he got me.

„Sea of Tranquility“ is a relatively short book that touches on such topics as time travel, or the theory that life is just a simulation.

Because it is so short it needs to move pretty fast to cover those ideas, and this is where it fell flat for me. There are too many characters being introduced too fast for any real character development, which in turn kept me from having any connection with those characters.

There was also a lot of talk about a pandemic, which felt kind of forced in just so that the author can write down her thoughts during COVID-19.

It was a easy and fast read and the writing style is pretty, but all in all the story didn't hold my interest.

One of the greatest pleasures of being alive is reading Emily St. John Mandel.

I tried - I really did - to savor this; I read and reread it in one sitting.

How can I describe it? When I was young, my Greek Sunday School teacher asked us to share the most awe-inspiring thing we'd ever experienced. I think she was hoping for an answer alluding to the religious, but I talked about looking out the window of a plane, seeing the vastness and the specifics - one red-roofed house here, a winding road with cars like ants there - all at the same time. Grasping that (to paraphrase) there was so much world, and that each and every person in it had their own inner thoughts and wants and fears just like I did. Reeling, simultaneously stunned and soothed by the universality of it all. Having just finished it for the second time, Sea of Tranquility - set across and within times and spaces and lives - feels something like that.

I love Emily St. John Mandel's previous novels so much I worried this one couldn't possibly continue to live up. It did, and more.

This book truly captivated me. Its intricate storyline and the way the author crafted it left me in awe, pondering how such a complex narrative came to be. Right from the start, it held my attention effortlessly. My edition was flawlessly written, devoid of any errors or grammatical slip-ups. The characters felt genuine, and the suspense surrounding the events kept me deeply engaged. Witnessing how all the elements seamlessly converged astounded me.

It's a remarkable narrative that delves into life's essence, time travel intricacies, pivotal life choices, and the impact of a pandemic. I never foresaw experiencing a global pandemic earlier in life, making the novel's backdrop incredibly relatable. Overall, it's an exceptional story with an array of surprising twists and turns that thoroughly delighted me.

It has a pretty slow start jumping between characters, but as the book progresses I got more invested and excited about where it was going. Coming in not knowing anything about the book was really nice because it headed in a direction I certainly was not expecting, with cool concepts that I liked and didn't expect from this book. Another thing I found really interesting was how my perspective of the cover changed. I had initially looked at the cover art and thought oh that's a cool moon coming over a serene landscape, but after reading it I realize that it straight up isn't a moon at all, which is something really cool how reading the book changes the perspective of how I view an image. I wonder if there's art that you make assumptions about but once you read the artists statement or something that the entire composition has a different meaning. The ending of the book was also really solid, I was expecting it to end with like a kind of disappointing ending but still wraps everything up nicely leaving a few unanswered questions, but in the final chapters it really ends in a way that I was satisfied with a ton.

Oh wow reading the synopsis on the Goodreads page now I realize I don't think I would have enjoyed or been nearly as invested in the book if I knew as much as the synopsis gives away.

2.5/5. I'm honestly a little conflicted, I kinda feel like this didn't work for me as much as it did for so many other people, given the amazing reviews on GR. Timey-wimey plots are always a hit or miss with me, and more often a miss, but that wasn't actually my main beef with it.

Firstly, I felt like there were so many interesting messages and themes that were touched on but then never explored - like the criticism against British colonialism at the beginning, and then it suggested an interesting link between the pandemic crossing borders with how colonizers brought diseases to indigenous peoples across the world. But then we barely got time with that thought before we go into some timey wimey plotline.

The time travel plot is fine in itself but I also feel like it wasn't as much explored as it could've been and I guess by the end of the book, I was just left with a deep sense of, “What was the message here? What was the point of this book?” If we're meant to just read this as a simple time travel plot without any reference to the larger commentary, then there's so much about the worldbuilding and storytelling that I couldn't get behind. I couldn't quite connect with any of Gaspery's motivations because it all just happened so out of the blue without any in-depth explanation. Why did he give up on his degree of criminology? Why did he want to join the Time Institute and why was he suddenly so passionate about it at the drop of a hat? It all seemed so convenient that a completely unqualified person like Gaspery without any necessary qualifications only needed a shoo-in interview with Ephrem to become what seems to be a highly skilled and professional job like being a time traveller.

I was also really confused about an entire segment (basically the whole part with Mirella and Vincent. I know Vincent played some part in the main story here but there was so much time spent on Mirella and her husband and the Ponzi scheme and Vincent's mysterious disappearanceThen I read some GR reviews and realised that this whole thing was basically a trailer leading to St John Mandel's *other* book, Glass Hotel, which I haven't read and therefore all of this didn't make sense to me. That was a bit annoying tbh... I like intertextuality but it's still gotta make some sense to people who may not have been exposed to that other work, especially since this isn't a series and isn't advertised as a continuation of anything. While the events referred to didn't turn out to be an integral part of this plot, to me as someone who hasn't read Glass Hotel, it felt like a plotline that could be important enough to warrant so much time spent dwelling on it by the characters but ultimately just went nowhere. The Station Eleven reference was a bit more subtle and therefore better, but both of these references still felt more gratuitous than anything. I feel like the author was trying to break a lot of 4th wall here, cos also why did one of the characters need to have a "double-sainted" name besides making reference to herself? I don't mind authors breaking the 4th wall but a lot of this just all felt frustratingly gratuitous and not actually serving any purpose.

It's easy to get swept away to Emily St. John Mandel's far flung settings as the story briskly moves from moment to moment, character to character, and timeline to timeline. St. John Mandel's writing is clean and the plot never lingers long enough for inertia to set in. And while that makes for a quick read, there's a certain slightness to the story that's hard to shake. St. John Mandel raises interesting questions and ideas, but doesn't really explore them in any deep, meaningful way.

I was lukewarm on Station Eleven, even though I loved the vibe and world St. John Mandel had crafted. I felt similarly about this book. I wanted to be more invested than I was and the major moments did not hit me as hard as I hoped they would.

HBO's adaptation of Station Eleven is one of the best shows I've watched in years, so perhaps I just need to wait for Sea of Tranquility to get the same treatment someday.

My thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

Time travel is a tough premise to pull off but this book takes that challenge on and slams one out of the park. I love me a closed loop time travel story, a story where the mechanics are much less important than the story being told. Rather intelligently this story incorporates the mechanics of time travel into its narrative, ultimately there is a satisfying accounting of events. The settings/times are each described in vivid detail, I really enjoyed the opening chapters especially the chapters that have us in 1900s Canada.

I didn't know this when I chose to read it, but this is very much a pandemic book and gave me the same melancholic catharsis I got from don't look up. I think that everyone dealt with lockdown in their own way, and I always get something out of reading or listening to someone process it. I empathized with Olives' story, and unlike don't look up, her ending really managed to bring out a smile.