{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?”<\/p>\n
Sea of Tranquility<\/strong> by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2022<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This novel starts slowly, but builds into something you won’t want to miss. It has terrific commentary on author tours and pandemics.<\/p>\n There are some funny moments, like when Gaspery, who lives in 2401, finds out his cat is from 1985.<\/p>\n Like Jo Walton did with Among Others<\/strong>, Mandel has incorporated aspects of her real life into the story and then given them a science fictional twist.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong>, after all these millennia of false alarms, now<\/strong> is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”<\/p>\n