Name: shaye's review of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Item: Sea of Tranquility
Rating: 4.5
Author: shaye

Emily St. John Mandel

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.

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.'

A Novel

Sea of Tranquility

Kiran Aftab

My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we're drawn to disaster, per se, but because we're drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.

“ if there is pleasure in action, there is peace in stillness”

Jamie Griffin

 i’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.

Nate

A life lived in a simulation is still a life.

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it's all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

The things we see when we're young, sometimes they don't stay with us.”

✧༺♥༻✧

“There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that 

, after all these millennia of false alarms, 

 is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Syrina

Evidence suggests they feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia 

Santa

There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

The award-winning author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel returns with a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. Sea of Tranquility is virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful. Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from English 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 aristocrat 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. PRAISE FOR SEA OF TRANQUILITY '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 'A spiraling, transportive triumph of storytelling-sci-fi with soul.' Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies '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 Reviews

Robyn Harley

“Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation”

Emiley Jones

In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn't know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I've been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.

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.

—and my point is, there's always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn't entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

She'd seen five of those tattoos, but that didn't make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone's skin.

…but there's something to be said for unplanned cities. Colony Two was soothing in its symmetry and its order. Sometimes order can be relentless.

He begins buying flowers every few days, which he places on his dresser in a cheap vase. He spends a long time gazing at them. He wishes he were an artist, to draw them and in so doing to see them more clearly.

fira

There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your ioved ones. 

I hadn't been successful at very many things, but I'd always been good at watching. That was how I knew my ex-wife had fallen in love with somneone else, just by being attentive. 

Naomi J.

Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: If you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears, because saying the word “pandemic” might bend the pandemic towards us… Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away, and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

Genesis (@whisperingchapters)

Just got #Mandeled. And by that I mean I think time is linear in the sense that if you look at a line head-on it collapses into a single point in on itself. Anyways. Fundamental revolutions about perceptions of time ASIDE. This was so crazy for me to have shelved all the way back in 2022 without really having an inkling about the book or even really getting into time travel fiction at that point so maybe this is proof that Emily St John Mandel (with a name like that you kind of have to be an author) knows something about time that we don't. I think what's more remarkable is that you could read this book in a loop and it would still hold up just as a strong. This is structure and pacing being pushed to its absolute  limit, and it is a joy to read -- all of those chapters are in the exact correct order. Very very very smart placement to the point where I sat for an hour thinking about how they came up with the order of the chapters.

shaye

TBR Roulette #208

Just got #Mandeled. And by that I mean I think time is linear in the sense that if you look at a line head-on it collapses into a single point in on itself. Anyways. Fundamental revolutions about perceptions of time ASIDE. This was so crazy for me to have shelved all the way back in 2022 without really having an inkling about the book or even really getting into time travel fiction at that point so maybe this is proof that Emily St John Mandel (with a name like that you kind of have to be an author) knows something about time that we don't. I think what's more remarkable is that you could read this book in a loop and it would still hold up just as a strong. This is structure and pacing being pushed to its absolute  limit, and it is a joy to read -- all of those chapters are in the exact correct order. Very very very smart placement to the point where I sat for an hour thinking about how they came up with the order of the chapters.

From the #1 bestselling author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted The Glass Hotel and the internationally bestselling Station Eleven comes a new novel of dazzling imagination In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the West coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, Emily St. John Mandel’s dazzling story follows these engrossing characters across space and time as their lives ultimately intersect. Sea of Tranquility is a breathtaking and wondrous examination of the ties that bind us together, by a master storyteller.

 is an easy read, thanks to Emily St. John Mandel's pinpoint prose. It’s light, believable, near-future sci-fi grounded in reality through its human themes and simple yet beautiful language and imagery. A truly great story that offers a glimpse into an inventive future.

It’s rare to find a time-travel story that doesn’t twist itself into a mind-bending pretzel of internal logic—

instead immerses us in the reality of its characters and their relationships, rather than the metaphysics of far-flung future tech.

Charlie Queen

Sea of Tranquility is an easy read, thanks to Emily St. John Mandel's pinpoint prose. It’s light, believable, near-future sci-fi grounded in reality through its human themes and simple yet beautiful language and imagery. A truly great story that offers a glimpse into an inventive future.

It’s rare to find a time-travel story that doesn’t twist itself into a mind-bending pretzel of internal logic—Sea of Tranquilityinstead immerses us in the reality of its characters and their relationships, rather than the metaphysics of far-flung future tech.

The second half of this book really hit me in the heart

Shoob 🧸

It takes a while for the plot to get going and the threads to connect. Felt a bit slow until then, but it’s a fairly unique take on the common trope of time travel.

Arnav Jain

Eva Ströberg

Such an eloquent story, about the actualities of current events, intertwined with elements of sci-fi without overwhelming non sci-fi readers.

The story started in 1912, a son of British nobleman sent to British Columbia for exile where he experienced the strangest thing in his walk. Fast forward in time, the same event was recorded in a amateur video camera that I started to connect the dot and thought I knew what was going on, but obviously not.

The storytelling was five stars and so was the story. My favourite book so far from this author

Ryan Mateyk

Speculative and beautiful, a meditative reflection of time and reality.

lala

What is up with St. John Mandel and pandemics? lol. Anyway, this was an interesting read. It's hard to pin down what the basic premise of the book is, especially compared to Station Eleven. Nevertheless, it's still science-fiction, and the book has different narrators along their lives and at the penultimate chapter it's woven beautifully between the different characters. It is kinda hard to grasp and to enjoy at first because the characters seems abstract but the payoff is great. I still prefer Station Eleven but this was a close second.

Elisavet Rozaki 

elizabeth

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.
From the very beginning of this book, I was intrigued. And I wasn't just intrigued by the clearly-drawn protagonist and lush north Pacific landscape; I was intrigued because I knew that Mandel isn't one to stick to just one protagonist and just one setting, or even one timeline. I knew she could truly weave a story, and she proves it again in Sea of Tranquility. The tapestry of this novel is made of settings and characters that are each so full and singular in their own right, and come together beautifully, as they do in Station Eleven. 

But in this case, the coming together of each strand in this tapestry occurs through time travel. Time travel can be a lazy plot device. So are pandemics, at this point. While Mandel doesn't go into much detail about the actual "how" of either of these elements, she isn't sloppy about them. If anything, too much explanation could cheapen the novel or simply land it more squarely in science fiction (or even the growing "pandemic fiction" genre), which seems inappropriate for this book. It's reflective and odd and full of heart. 

There's something so cinematic about Mandel's style here that I can't put my finger on. She doesn't dwell on flowery descriptions, yet I feel I can picture each setting with clarity. Sometimes she brings us into a scene--or whole world--in medias res; as a reader, it's like I'm sitting back in a planetarium and watching each storyline orbit by.

Started in Pula, read intensly on the plane, finished settling in the lonely. How I absolutely loved the first part of the book, posing the questions, and the atmosphere. The connection was lost once everything was answered. The clarity is just so utterly unfamiliar to me I cannot even enjoy it in a book.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Started in Pula, read intensly on the plane, finished settling in the lonely. How I absolutely loved the first part of the book, posing the questions, and the atmosphere. The connection was lost once everything was answered. The clarity is just so utterly unfamiliar to me I cannot even enjoy it in a book.

Megan

This book is fantastic and I really don’t want to say more than that. Read it without knowing anything about it. All hail Emily St. John Mandel

neri

Oh my god. I don't even know how to properly review this because I don't think I have the words for it. I will try to make this coherent but not quite sure if I will manage to do so.

This was amazing, at least for me. I love books that go around time travel when its executed properly and oh, this one was insanely good. I don't think I've liked a book this much in months, a year even.

The way Emily St. John Mandel writes is beautiful. The words, phrases, characters and events are connected like woven threads in the most lovely way. The way I could easily imagine everything, how tender it was described: it was splendid. I don't really know how to explain this properly but the way the characters are written feela like a sunday afternoon to me, does that make sense? Mostly because of how they are described.

I really love the topic around humanity, being worried about people; caring because you know them, and not in the personal, close friends, way. And I also loved the way the glitch, and everything surrounding it (trying really hard to avoid explicit spoilers) was handled and explained. I was hooked. It almost felt cinematic. 

It was also somehow poetic, I genuinely don't know how it made me feel. The characters were great! Not really knowing fully who they were or who they could be was amazing. The intrigue and curiosity, and temporary feeling of sadness regarding some of the topics. It really got to me. "In those streets everyone moved faster than me, what they didn't know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I've beeb thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush."

Loved also the way bureaucracy was talked about. How institutions handle issues, or anomalies in this case. How inhumane and cold they are. 

The ending for me it was perfect; the acceptance, the "so what" of it all (again, trying really hard not to make any spoilers). Nostalgia, tenderness, and caring. Also learning who Gaspery actually was in the end, how it all made sense, was amazing. Its not a "boom" of an ending, but a soft "whoa" one. And I love that!!! 

Anyways, I'm rambling a lot without making any sense. Plus I'm sure my English is broke at this point. But in short: Loved this. Definitely one of my favourite reads and I can't wait to re read it again, and again. I am also getting a physical copy as soon as I can. This was wonderful, greatly executed (since I don't think it's easy to write a book about this, specially when it's surrounding time travel) and tender and lovely and human. "A life lived in a simulation is still a life".

While I loved the prose and the structure (prosody between theme and structure woohoo), I felt underwhelmed by the payoff. Strong start though.

alice

Loved Glass Hotel, so was excited to get into this one. But I didn't really understand it. There were points in the story I felt could have been better elaborated to give more structure to the overall plot. The character descriptions were lacking which was a big pitfall. Very dissatisfying.

Dani

We’ll round it up to 5⭐️ here.

Exceptional. Emily St John Mandel has become an instant buy for me because the way her prose knits together never fails to hit the right note. It is something I cannot put into words, and so I am not going to try. I will take some time to get my bearings, and then I will come back and try to describe what it is that makes the whole of it work so well together. In the meantime I will say this: Mandel’s writing transports you to places previously unimagined. You won’t feel at ease, and that seems to be the point. To use the energy of that journey and let it transform what is around you. If I had to describe how I feel when I read her novels, I’d be likely to use the words unmoored, or adrift. It’s not a matter of forgetting where I am, but when I am. And it is a delightful experience.

Allison Dempsey

I only wish this was longer - I read it in one day. Will be carrying this one with me for quite some time. Possibly even better than The Glass Hotel, which I didn’t think was possible.

Honestly loved how monotone this read was

Deepika Ramesh

‘I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.’

The irony of reading that passage, while riding a train, and as the setting sun rushed to catch up with the train’s speed, was not lost on me. It’s possible to be a still point in the ceaseless rush — like reading a novel like this one and wondering about its reluctant to be grand but still becoming precisely that at the end. 

We go to writers for some of our unique needs to be met; I go to Mandel for the grandeur of simple things in her stories and to be reminded of my own fragile heart. Should I read the remainder of three books written by Emily St. John Mandel to declare that she is my favourite writer? Or having read three of her books will do?

Interesting concept, but I was definitely less enthusiastic about it than I thought I would be 

Francesca Starecheski

It was woven beautifully, but to me, written plainly, monotone echoes in my mind.

Ryan 

4.5 to 5 stars

i'm still in shock of just how mind-blowing and clever the author has done with the storytelling by the last 20 pages of the book (so do not jump to the last page to spoil yourself). i'm also shocked just how many months it has been in my shelf that i should've read it sooner.

emily st. john mandel is truly listed as one of my favorite authors, i'm curious to pick up the glass hotel yet i'm scared from the rating that i'll be having the third-book curse (in reference to me with celeste ng's *disappointing* recent novel). if you need a digestible literary fiction novel with deft use of storytelling and hopeful themes on humanity, this is my go-to recommendation.

Keely Calagos

Similar to Station Eleven, ESJM weaves a full cast of characters in different time periods together into a beautiful novel. The audiobook is read by multiple narrators which made it quite easy to keep track of the who, what, when, and where. This story felt eerily plausible, which makes me wonder if Emily herself is a time traveler… 🧐

I loved this book but Station Eleven is still my favorite. I’m eager to read The Glass House next.

More on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce6msLRpm...

Cody Degen

Realized I'm probably going to read everything she ever writes, and just ignore every time she gets into self-referential/allegorical stuff where I think she gets a little heavy-handed.

Syahla Aurel

In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn't know was that I had already moved to fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I've been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.

My initial reaction : omg this book is so boring and what is the point of this 
My reaction after finishing this book : wow okay that makes sense 

Although it was a great book I still think that there were unnecessary parts/chapters (I don't care about Edwin and I want to know more about Olivia and Vincent or literally anyone but him)

Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel