Sea of Tranquility

3.5

There's a central mystery to Sea of Tranquility, although this is not what you would normally call a mystery novel. Three people who are separated by centuries experience a jarring anomaly where their moments bleed into the others: a glimpse of leafy tree branches overhead, a snatch of a violin lullaby, the whoosh of an airship taking off. We're not sure what happened, and the characters are disturbed enough by it that it becomes an important moment in the lives of those who experienced it.

The characters have other disruptions in their lives: Edwin St. Andrew has been exiled from England to Canada in 1912 because his father doesn't like his views on empire and colonialism. Mirella's husband has committed suicide because he invested heavily in a financial scheme that turned out to be a fraud perpetrated by the husband of Mirella's best friend. Olive Llewellyn is an author on tour on Earth to promote her best selling book, and missing her husband and daughter back home in their Moon Colony, just as a global (and interplanetary) pandemic begins. Finally there is Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who is at loose ends after the end of a failed marriage when he takes up a job as a security guard at a hotel in Moon Colony Two.

I feel an atmosphere of slight melancholy in Emily St. John Mandel's novels, which along with the lovely simplicity of her writing, keeps me coming back. There is sadness in the background, and often sadness in the foreground too, but her characters keep moving forward, creating their lives.

Such an enjoyable read. Sea of Tranquility surprised my with its plot, its sci-fi but literary sensibilities and the beauty of its writing.
This is a book involving time travel, and a sci-fi novel for people who don't like traditional sci-fi. There's something reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin or Ted Chiang but of course there's a contemporaneity that can only come from a Covid-19-era publication. There's a humanity and philosophical beauty to St John Mandel's prose that is quietly moving and deeply satisfying.

I loved the book's novelty. The idea was well-executed. The coincidences were a bit jarring. I wouldn't search for something deep within these pages; that might lead to disappointment. Not really meant as a critique, but reading about covid within a fictionalized book will never not be jarring. I also found it interesting how the book within the book felt like it was based on another book by the author.

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.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a book of literary science fiction. The book description from the publisher describes it best: “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. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.”

Sea of Tranquility is the latest book of literary science fiction—more literary than scientific—from Emily St. John Mandel about time travel that crosses many centuries from the early twentieth century to five hundred years later. We follow an exiled young socialite on his journey to Canada from England, an author from a moon colony on her book tour down on Earth, and a detective as they each witness a vision of a violinist in an airport terminal, an experience disconcerting to all of them as it's out of context to their life experience. What is this aural glitch? That's the heart of the narrative to this compelling and beautifully written novel.

One thing of note is that although this is a novel of science fiction, there is very little science or explanations of how this phenomena happens. Once revealed that we are in fact experiencing a kind of time travel, the effect is more hallucinatory than practical, more hypnotic than mechanical. Who is this violinist in the airport? Why are these three “seeing” him in different centuries? It's a mystery worth exploring for us readers.

St. John Mandel is an exceptional writer and her prose is elegant and restrained. She does a fantastic job of setting scenes and developing her characters, painting her story across many centuries poetically yet clearly. If there is one thing disappointing about this novel, then it's the explanation of how time travel is possible in this story. As someone who has read comic books and science fiction growing up as well as watching movies like The Matrix trilogy, the explanation of how the violinist time travels is not original; this theory (I won't give it away here) has been posed in so many other mediums. This revelation, though, didn't diminish my enjoyment of the novel. If science fiction without much science is a thing, then sign me up. I enjoyed being in St. John Mandel's universe of hallucinatory possibilities and the longing for human connection across realities and time.

I really enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this book 5 stars.

Absolutely loved this book! It was thought provoking and mysterious, and it managed multiple POVs wonderfully each character was interesting and I enjoyed reading each one. A very interesting sci-fi that is quite different to so many of the sci-fi books I have read, much more contemporary but still amazing.

“[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]” by [a:Emily St. John Mandel 2786093 Emily St. John Mandel https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1576606299p2/2786093.jpg] was my first book by this author so I was completely in the dark about what to expect. What I definitely didn't expect was the author taking a generous helping of common science fiction tropes and mixing them all up.First of all, there's time travel which leads to thoughts of reality actually being a simulation and for good measure Mandel unoriginally throws in a pandemic...With several timelines and narrative threads, jumping back and forth, the story became convoluted and hard to follow at times. I found it difficult to fully engage with the characters or their predicaments; especially since some were never fully developed (e. g. Edwin or, even worse, Thalia). There are moments where the characters seem to exist purely as vehicles for the story, rather than as fully-realised individuals.Mandel's writing was fine but, mostly, nothing out of the ordinary. There were moments - for example when describing the Canadian wilderness or, late in the book, our lonesome protagonist watching the sky - when the writing soars high above its previous “serviceable” quality. Those are rare occasions, though.The story itself was lacklustre to me: The anomaly was mildly interesting but never exciting and the resolution as predictable as anti-climactic. The pandemic part, well, we've just emerged from one and the descriptions of empty streets, lockdowns, etc. are nothing special. The time travel concept never goes beyond the most basic problems (“Don't modify the timeline or things might happen!”) and, lastly, the non-issue of the “reality as a simulation” theme is easily deconstructed by the book itself:»this is what the Time Institute never understood: 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.«So, here's to living and reading better books! Three out of five stars for this mediocre one.Blog Facebook Twitter Mastodon Instagram Pinterest Medium Matrix TumblrCeterum censeo Putin esse delendam

What's the opposite of a book slump? A boom? Well, I'm in a book boom. Another 5 star read. I feel like Oprah handing out cars - you get 5 stars and you get 5 stars etc. Long may the boom continue.

This was an awesome read btw.

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.

4.5

Honestly, meh. I think it needed to be more developed for me to love it. I didn't hate it - but it felt rushed for something with so much weaving.

I liked the uniqueness of this book. Definitely kept me engaged from start to end.

Wow...
My brain has been altered and I don't know what to do about that

Tender. Sweet. The periods about parenting in the pandemic were triggering and hard for me.

Almost gave up in the beginning, the setup for the story is quite tedious with little to keep you interested. After that however, it picks up very quickly and I finished the rest of the book in one sitting.

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.

It comes together, picks up the pace, and gets much more interesting around 100 pages. The the ‘first act' felt disjointed, incomplete, and confusing where things are headed or what the plot is.  However, excellent back half/last third when the writer starts to weave all of the storylines and characters together in clever ways with some surprises thrown in. Enjoyed the way it came full circle at the end.

3.5 stars.

The author incorporates simulation theory well into the book. Here's a great quote:

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.

4.5

4.5/5 stars

Pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book!
—–
A Sea of Tranquility is easily one of my favourite reads of the year so far. It's hard to explain why I loved it so much without spoiling everything.
However, I can tell you that I am an absolute sucker for a book with intertwining storylines. So, even though the book started off slow for me, the moment all the different storylines started to interconnect I knew this was going to be a new favourite.
Highly recommend.

Beautiful writing but light on ideas. Feels a bit like an inferior copy of Cloud Atlas, with a hint of pandemic to make it more modern

It was too short... I wanted more. I feel by around page 200 things are just starting to get going. I loved the different story tellers and how at times you forget their story is part of something larger.

I liked it, would recommend it and will definitely check out her other books.

I really enjoyed the first half (or so) of this book that introduces the different characters and connects all of them.

However, once the story is being told from Gaspery's point of view, I found the pacing accelerated a bit too much. There's a lot of action packed at the end and it feels rushed. All of the characters we invested time in learning about at the start are even hardly mentioned.

I didn't really get the point of the ending either, it felt abrupt.