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
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with 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.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
"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 the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
"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
WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, Goodreads, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Oprah Daily, LitHub, USA Today, San Francisco Examiner, Glamour, Mother Jones, Esquire, The Millions, TOR.com, The Weather Channel, and Kirkus
CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE • ON PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SUMMER READING LIST
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: TIME, 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
"In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world' and who one day might live well beyond."
-Laird Hunt, The New York Times
"Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel's previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting-the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction'-to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction."
-Katy Waldman,
CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE • ON PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SUMMER READING LIST
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: TIME, 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
"In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and…project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart…Born of…empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this ‘green-and-blue world' and who one day might live well beyond."
-Laird Hunt, The New York Times
"Sea of Tranquility is broader in scope than any of Mandel's previous novels, voyaging profligately across lands and centuries…Destabilizing, extraordinary, and blood-boiling…Mandel weds a sharp, ambivalent self-accounting-the type of study that tends to wear the label ‘autofiction'-to a speculative epic. We are shown what two forms can offer each other, and exposed to the interrogating possibilities of science fiction."
-Katy Waldman,
Readers Top Reviews
CatmanduRLPNorman
This time-travel novel from award-winning Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel stands head-and-shoulders above other recent literary novels in this genre. It is both a fun mystery, with all the required temporal conundrums and surprises, and a beautiful meditation on reality and humanity. It is also a pandemic novel, but thankfully it is neither sensational nor sentimental. Mandel reflects on the deep questions raised by the pandemic, weaving them into her jaunts through time. Not all the periods she takes us to are equally successful: The 23rd century book tour, while fun, felt very much like a 21st century book tour. But the wilds of 1912 Canada and the lunar Night City of the 25th century are beautifully-evoked. The writing is both stylish and efficient, making for a pleasurable read that quickly becomes completely gripping.
James BrydonCatma
In format this wonderful novel reminded me a bit of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (another wonderful novel) – it adopts a similar almost concentric structure, with sections from different time periods. At its most basic level, it is a science fiction story, with a character travelling back from the future to iron out slight anomalies in the flow of time that had been identified at different points in the past. However, that description is woefully inadequate, as that thread is merely one of the gems that the novel offers. Another marvellous aspect is the story of Olive, a future novelist born on the moon, but visiting Earth as part of the promotional activity that arises when one of her novels is made into a blockbuster film. While she is travelling to major venues around twenty-third century Earth, she reads about the outbreak of a new, extremely virulent disease. Missing her husband and daughter, she cuts short her tour to return to the moon, hoping to avoid being caught in a global lockdown. Emily St John Mandel has presumably been caught up in her own promotional tours, especially after the phenomenal success of her novel Station Eleven, itself subsequently turned into a major television series. Her depiction of the impact of a global … indeed, galactic pandemic is all too familiar to current day readers as the world gradually emerges from the shadow of Covid 19. The Glass Hotel featured a cameo appearance by Miranda, who had drawn the comic series from which Station Eleven took its name. Similarly, Vincent, the principal figure of The Glass Hotel is mentioned here, one of the characters having been in her circle during her association with the Ponzi scheme financier. This novel is yet another great success for Emily St John Mandel. Her ability to create immensely believable character is matched by her deftness at constructing marvellous plots and scenarios for them to populate.
Kindle James Bry
Sea of Tranquility “A simulated life is still a life” (Gaspery, a character in Sea of Tranquility) Sea of Tranquility By Emily St. John Mandel Knopf: 272 pages, $25 Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian writer with a marvelous talent for taking old stories, i.e., pandemics, Ponzi schemes, or time travel, and making them fresh. Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s new novel, demonstrates this. Mandel is often labeled as an author of speculative fiction, science fiction, and auto-fiction. She can combine many plots and have multiple characters, some of them appearing from novel to novel, and yet she ties the threads together. Here is a sample of her clear but often lyrical prose: “What it was like to leave Earth: a rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.” A single surreal incident is the core event of Sea of Tranquility. In 1912, an 18-year-old Englishman named Edwin St. John St. Andrew, disillusioned with the British Empire, meets a mysterious stranger and then walks into a Canadian forest. Underneath a giant maple tree, he suddenly feels he is in some vast interior, like a train station or a cathedral. There are notes of violin music. Edwin is terrified by a combination of unearthly sounds. Is he going mad? In 1994, a young woman named Vincent is filming the same tree and sky and hears violin music and unexplained sounds. The same stranger is lurking in the forest. Is time, itself, unraveling with one event bleeding into other time periods? Are there parallel worlds in everyone’s personal story? At a party, years later, Vincent meets a visitor who reveals her spouse is running a Ponzi scheme and that she and her friends will be ruined in a few months. In another scene, a writer named Olive Llewellyn—not unlike Mandel—is warned by the same mysterious visitor to cancel her book tour because something deadly (a pandemic) will soon happen. The mystery man is a time traveler detective named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts living on the moon in the 25th century in a colony called the Night City. He works for a sinister organization called the Time Institute. Gaspery’s assignment is to travel back into the past and discover why separate incidents from different centuries are rupturing and overlapping into each other. Here is where Mandel gets complex with stories within stories. Mandel’s fictional character, novelist Olive Llewellyn, has an individual named Gaspery in her bestseller Marienbad, which was released in the 23rd century. Marienbad is a dystopian novel she wrote on the brink of an actual pandemic. Ironically, this parallels Mandel herself whose huge hit, Stations Eleven—about a pandemic—was published b...
Richard JebbKindl
I was immediately transformed by the vivid and visceral descriptions of unforgettable places and characters rendered to life by this brilliant writer. Emily St John Mandel is master story teller. The story moves across oceans, continents and Luna terra with her heart racing plot. A jewel fabricated with clues and surprises. Worlds unfolding into others across space and time with majesty and wonder inside the intricacies of this perfectly paced science fiction adventure novel. The authors’ words come to life as real as a walk into a grove in a first growth forrest or a familiar existence within a lunar colony. This is already a classic. Thank you!
Ethon O'BrienRich
You think you know what's going on at some point in this book? You're wrong. This book made me audibly gasp at least five times with the twists it had. Everytime you think you know where the story is going, it throws you for a loop. This is my second book by this author. My first was Station Eleven. While I enjoyed that book, it was a much more straightforward story. The ending was nice and the story was enjoyable, but it wasn't quite as enthralling as Sea of Tranquility. In the beginning, I thought Edwin St. Andrew was going to be the Arthur of this story and I was going to learn a lot about his life. I was fully ready for a simple and interesting story about Edwin. By the third chapter I was fascinated by the character and would have enjoyed reading about his life. What I got was so much more than I expected. Everyone should read this book
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...
