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 bestselling 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 …
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 bestselling 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.
I'm OK with the time travel paradoxes -- those are inevitable. But to me it's a pretty bad plot weakness here that the Time Institute notices, and manages to find documentation of, a glitch in the matrix that just looks to three observers like a migraine symptom or a petit mal epileptic fit. People's brains and senses make up all sorts of weird shit all the time, and nobody takes it as evidence of anything particularly significant.
Although the time anomaly and time travel in this book are of the standard variety the author manages to give the concept an uniqie and compelling spin. It's more about the characters that encounter the anomaly and are linked through it while they're unstuck and kind of isolated in their own time. I appreciated the inclusion of pandemics in the narrative but it's a little depressing that people don't seem to have learned from them even centuries in the future. There are some minor flaws but I liked the overall feel of the book.
Although the time anomaly and time travel in this book are of the standard variety the author manages to give the concept an uniqie and compelling spin. It's more about the characters that encounter the anomaly and are linked through it while they're unstuck and kind of isolated in their own time. I appreciated the inclusion of pandemics in the narrative but it's a little depressing that people don't seem to have learned from them even centuries in the future. There are some minor flaws but I liked the overall feel of the book.
in general a big fan of this linked trilogy and this felt like a good extension of the others. it gets better as it goes along / if you live as if it's real, it will be real
in general a big fan of this linked trilogy and this felt like a good extension of the others. it gets better as it goes along / if you live as if it's real, it will be real
I found this touching and hopeful, I liked how poignantly the characters were drawn, and the themes of kindness and the vicissitudes of life.
My main complaint was that I think the simulation theory stuff was basically an unnecessary macguffin and didn't add to the themes (at least as far as they interested me).
I found this touching and hopeful, I liked how poignantly the characters were drawn, and the themes of kindness and the vicissitudes of life.
My main complaint was that I think the simulation theory stuff was basically an unnecessary macguffin and didn't add to the themes (at least as far as they interested me).
Another good book from the author of Station Eleven
4 stars
Another exciting time travel story with a cool twist at the end. I appreciate the conclusion around the Simulation Hypothesis. Made me think of Cloud Atlas or the Years of Salt and Rice.
I liked the story of isolated humans trying to find meaning in their lives, all tangled together and touched by the miraculous. It left me feeling hopeful and reassured.
This book washed over me. I loved the story and the way it made me feel about family, about time. The way the different stories knit together, the moments of realization that the author flawlessly sets up and executes... all of it. Lovely.
Content warning
Contains slight spoilers after 1st paragraph
Emily St. John Mandel is such an incredibly talented author and this book is richly written. The characters are intriguing and the plot will kind of blow your mind, put it back together, and then blow it again.
When Emily St. John Mandel wrote her first book about pandemics (Station Eleven), very few of us had ever lived through one. Now, we all have the experience of COVID lockdowns, being confined to career/education-by-Zoom, not seeing another human in person for weeks on end, not hugging family members for months on end...this book is highly informed by those experiences, and this author is the exact write person to write us through that shared experience (even if this pandemic is set a few hundred years in the future).
A breezy, fun(ish, given some of the subject matter) read. The resolution of the book hinges, somewhat, on a twist that is revealed near the end, and I must confess that I was finding the book far more satisfying up to the point that the twist was revealed. It just felt a bit too “plotty” to me in a book that otherwise revels in nice details.
Fantastic to a point I did not expect. Very meta, and covers aspects that took me by surprise. I rarely read the descriptions of books written by authors that I have read before, and here it totally paid off. If you have read the previous two works by this author, you will like where this book takes you.
