Science Fiction
![Emily St. John Mandel - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B002BMMGK2.jpg)
Sea of Tranquility: A novel
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, 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.
"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet."-The New York Times
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.
"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet."-The New York Times
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.
Editorial Reviews
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: TIME Magazine, Today.com, Oprah.com, Bloomberg, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times,Fortune, Glamour, Buzzfeed, Good Housekeeping, Vulture, Bustle,Lit Hub, Medium, Parade, PopSugar, Tech Radar, TOR.com and more
"I could write a thousand words about Emily St. John Mandel, and this book, and this moment but I won't dare spoil it. Truly soul-affirming."
-Emma Straub, best-selling author of All Adults Here
"A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling - sci-fi with soul."
-Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies
"In Mandel's stunning latest, people find themselves inhabiting different places and times, from early 20th-century Canada to a 23rd-century moon colony… The novel's narratives crystallize flawlessly. Brilliantly combining imagery from science fiction and the current pandemic, Mandel grounds her rich metaphysical speculation in small, beautifully observed human moments. By turns playful, tragic, and tender, this should not be missed."
-Publishers Weekly, starred
"A complicated and mysterious puzzle concerning the nature of reality solved perfectly, all loose ends connected... Even more boldly imagined than Station Eleven. Exciting to read, relevant, and satisfying."
-Kirkus, starred
"A time-travel puzzle… Mandel's prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly… In the end, the novel's interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love."
-BookPage, starred
"An emotionally devastating novel about human connection: what we are to one another-and what we should be."
-Omar El Akkad, Scientific American
"If you loved Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, you'll devour this dystopian novel that's about time travel and mystery as much as it is about love, the importance of family and how much our individual actions impact the wor...
"I could write a thousand words about Emily St. John Mandel, and this book, and this moment but I won't dare spoil it. Truly soul-affirming."
-Emma Straub, best-selling author of All Adults Here
"A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling - sci-fi with soul."
-Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies
"In Mandel's stunning latest, people find themselves inhabiting different places and times, from early 20th-century Canada to a 23rd-century moon colony… The novel's narratives crystallize flawlessly. Brilliantly combining imagery from science fiction and the current pandemic, Mandel grounds her rich metaphysical speculation in small, beautifully observed human moments. By turns playful, tragic, and tender, this should not be missed."
-Publishers Weekly, starred
"A complicated and mysterious puzzle concerning the nature of reality solved perfectly, all loose ends connected... Even more boldly imagined than Station Eleven. Exciting to read, relevant, and satisfying."
-Kirkus, starred
"A time-travel puzzle… Mandel's prose is beautiful but unfussy; some chapters are compressed into a few poetic lines. The story moves quickly… In the end, the novel's interlocking plot resolves beautifully, making for a humane and moving time-travel story, as well as a meditation on loneliness and love."
-BookPage, starred
"An emotionally devastating novel about human connection: what we are to one another-and what we should be."
-Omar El Akkad, Scientific American
"If you loved Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, you'll devour this dystopian novel that's about time travel and mystery as much as it is about love, the importance of family and how much our individual actions impact the wor...
Readers Top Reviews
Erin ShaughnessyS
This will change your perspective on life and living in the time of our current pandemic. Truly loves this book.
Star WomanErin Sh
If you liked Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, you'll love this! It was so gratifying to see so many threads from previous books tied into this story, along with new characters and stories. Perhaps my favorite element was the author-as-character story arc, which seems quite autobiographical and adds another layer of interest to the story - how much is from the author's "real life"? Which ties in beautifully with the novel's general premise (do we live in a simulation?). Beautiful language, compelling characterization, make-you-think sci fi elements... A fun read. My only complaint is I was sad when it was over - I would've loved another hundred pages. But that's not really a complaint, is it? Highly recommend.
WeaslgrlStar Woma
A beautifully written, wistful, and mind-bending time-travel puzzle. It's character-driven sci-fi, where the world-building is an organic part of the narrative (no exposition dumps or nerdsplaining). If the library gives me enough time, I want to re-read this to further explore both the puzzle and the beauty of the concepts. “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 simulation is still a life.”
mountain mamaWeas
I love Emily St. John Mandel as a writer. Her imagination is stellar and her ability to weave threads of a story together is exceptional.
Troy Dickerson mo
Emily St John Mandel isn't so much a writer as she is a story teller and this is truly a story you will simply not want to miss out on. It will be of particular interest, I believe, to those readers who were taken with her novel Station Eleven, as it's more post apocalyptic and science fiction, but it's tale told by an author who brings characters to life on the page and weaves a tale that is impossible to forget.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
No star burns forever. 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. Not "civilization," whatever that is, but the actual planet.
Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren't annihilating. A year before I began my training at the Time Institute, I went to a dinner party at my friend Ephrem's place. He was just back from a vacation on Earth, and he had a story about going on a walk in a cemetery with his daughter, Meiying, who was four at the time. Ephrem was an arborist. He liked to go to old cemeteries to look at the trees. But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl, Ephrem told me, and he just wanted to leave after that. He was used to graveyards, he sought them out, he'd always said he didn't find them depressing, just peaceful, but that one grave just got to him. He looked at it and was unbearably sad. Also it was the worst kind of Earth summer day, impossibly humid, and he felt like he couldn't get enough air. The drone of the cicadas was oppressive. Sweat ran down his back. He told his daughter it was time to go, but she lingered by the gravestone for a moment.
"If her parents loved her," Meiying said, "it would have felt like the end of the world."
It was such an eerily astute observation, Ephrem told me, that he stood there staring at her and found himself thinking, Where did you come from? They got out of the cemetery with di!culty-"She had to stop and inspect every goddamn flower and pinecone," he said-and never went back.
Those are the worlds that end in our day-to-day lives, these stopped children, these annihilating losses, but at the end of Earth there will be actual, literal annihilation, hence the colonies. The first colony on the moon was intended as a prototype, a practice run for establishing a presence in other solar systems in the coming centuries. "Because we'll have to," the president of China said, at the press conference where construction on the first colony was announced, "eventually, whether we want to or not, unless we want all of human history and achievement to get sucked into a supernova a few million years down the line."
I watched footage of that press conference in my sister Zoey's o!ce, three hundred years after the fact. The president behind the lectern with her o!cials arrayed around her, a crowd of reporters below the stage. One of them raised his hand: "Are we sure it's going to be a supernova?"
"Of course not," the president said. "It could be anything. Rogue planet, asteroid storm, you name it. The point is that we're orbiting a star, and all stars eventually die."
"But if the star dies," I said to Zoey, "obviously the Earth's moon goes with it."
"Sure," she said, "but we're just the prototype, Gaspery. We're just proof of concept. The Far Colonies have been populated for a hundred and eighty years."
2
The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.
There was substantial interest in immigration to the colony. Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding or heat. The colony's architects had set aside space for substantial residential development, which sold out quickly. The developers lobbied successfully for a second colony when they ran out of space in Colony One. But Colony Two was built a little too hastily, and within a century the lighting system on the main dome had failed. The lighting system was meant to mimic the appearance of the sky as viewed from Earth-it was nice to look up and see blue, as opposed to looking up into the void-and when it failed there was no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue. Which is not to suggest that there wasn't light, but that light was extremely unearthlike: on a bright day, the colonists looked up into space. The juxtaposition of utter darkness with bright light made some people dizzy, although whether this was physical or psychological was up for debate. More seriously, the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-four-hour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there were two straight weeks of night.
The cost of repair was deemed prohibitive. There was a degree of adaptation-bedroom windows were outfitted with shutters, so people could sleep during the...
No star burns forever. 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. Not "civilization," whatever that is, but the actual planet.
Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren't annihilating. A year before I began my training at the Time Institute, I went to a dinner party at my friend Ephrem's place. He was just back from a vacation on Earth, and he had a story about going on a walk in a cemetery with his daughter, Meiying, who was four at the time. Ephrem was an arborist. He liked to go to old cemeteries to look at the trees. But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl, Ephrem told me, and he just wanted to leave after that. He was used to graveyards, he sought them out, he'd always said he didn't find them depressing, just peaceful, but that one grave just got to him. He looked at it and was unbearably sad. Also it was the worst kind of Earth summer day, impossibly humid, and he felt like he couldn't get enough air. The drone of the cicadas was oppressive. Sweat ran down his back. He told his daughter it was time to go, but she lingered by the gravestone for a moment.
"If her parents loved her," Meiying said, "it would have felt like the end of the world."
It was such an eerily astute observation, Ephrem told me, that he stood there staring at her and found himself thinking, Where did you come from? They got out of the cemetery with di!culty-"She had to stop and inspect every goddamn flower and pinecone," he said-and never went back.
Those are the worlds that end in our day-to-day lives, these stopped children, these annihilating losses, but at the end of Earth there will be actual, literal annihilation, hence the colonies. The first colony on the moon was intended as a prototype, a practice run for establishing a presence in other solar systems in the coming centuries. "Because we'll have to," the president of China said, at the press conference where construction on the first colony was announced, "eventually, whether we want to or not, unless we want all of human history and achievement to get sucked into a supernova a few million years down the line."
I watched footage of that press conference in my sister Zoey's o!ce, three hundred years after the fact. The president behind the lectern with her o!cials arrayed around her, a crowd of reporters below the stage. One of them raised his hand: "Are we sure it's going to be a supernova?"
"Of course not," the president said. "It could be anything. Rogue planet, asteroid storm, you name it. The point is that we're orbiting a star, and all stars eventually die."
"But if the star dies," I said to Zoey, "obviously the Earth's moon goes with it."
"Sure," she said, "but we're just the prototype, Gaspery. We're just proof of concept. The Far Colonies have been populated for a hundred and eighty years."
2
The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.
There was substantial interest in immigration to the colony. Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding or heat. The colony's architects had set aside space for substantial residential development, which sold out quickly. The developers lobbied successfully for a second colony when they ran out of space in Colony One. But Colony Two was built a little too hastily, and within a century the lighting system on the main dome had failed. The lighting system was meant to mimic the appearance of the sky as viewed from Earth-it was nice to look up and see blue, as opposed to looking up into the void-and when it failed there was no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue. Which is not to suggest that there wasn't light, but that light was extremely unearthlike: on a bright day, the colonists looked up into space. The juxtaposition of utter darkness with bright light made some people dizzy, although whether this was physical or psychological was up for debate. More seriously, the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-four-hour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there were two straight weeks of night.
The cost of repair was deemed prohibitive. There was a degree of adaptation-bedroom windows were outfitted with shutters, so people could sleep during the...
