Sea of Tranquility
{4.5/5} “Research teams had been working on time travel for decades, both on Earth and in the colonies. In that context, a university for the study of physics with an underground passageway to the police headquarters and countless literal back doors into government made perfect sense. What is time travel if not a security problem?”
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2022
In 1912 Edwin St. Andrew is in the forest of Vancouver Island when he experiences an anomalous event — for just a moment he’s somewhere else. In 2020 Mirella is trying to track down her old friend Vincent when she finds out she’s died. She sees a video where Vincent experienced a moment where the screen goes black and there are anomalous sounds. A man named Gaspery comes to talk to her, but she realizes she’s seen him before — years ago, when she was a kid and he was being arrested.
This novel starts slowly, but builds into something you won’t want to miss. It has terrific commentary on author tours and pandemics.
There are some funny moments, like when Gaspery, who lives in 2401, finds out his cat is from 1985.
Like Jo Walton did with Among Others, Mandel has incorporated aspects of her real life into the story and then given them a science fictional twist.
One more quotation: “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.”
I’ve read 2 books by Mandel. I previously reviewed Station Eleven.