Ray Nessly's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

4.5 stars. Won the GR poll for Sci-Fi

“If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to the news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility.

close up of cover art:


It may or may not surprise you that some folks (physicists among them) theorize, or even think it’s probable, that the world we perceive is entirely imaginary, that the universe is a simulation: a computer program, nothing but software (but oh what software!), an unimaginably long and complicated string of code whipped and blended into a (ultra-super-duper) super computer, in a future and/or other world, by … who? Or what? Some greenish gihugous gloppy brain floating in a Pyrex beaker? Hell if I know, nor does anyone else. It’s, as they say, “just” a theory. Emily St. John Mandel wades deep n’ dirty into this subject in her fascinating time-travel novel, Sea of Tranquility. It may not rise to 5 stars, but it’s very good, call it 4.5 stars. I liked this one even more than her previous novel Station Eleven, which I gave 3.5 stars.

Considering all the territory it covers in only 255 pages, Sea of T is a remarkably taut novel. (Might it be adaptable to film some day by some brave soul? I hope so.) It switches gears often, in time and in place. My takeaway is that it’s probably best to read this book in big chunks. Myself, I would have liked the chapter titles to be more descriptive, to help one recall the action and themes after you’ve read it. Few chapters state where the action takes place (a long list of cities and countries on Earth, on several moon colonies, and far beyond). Further, while most of the chapter titles do state the years involved, some chapters don’t state them at all, or omit some. I don’t have the energy to list all the places and time periods as well, but for the benefit of my future self, who I can easily imagine wanting to read this again, the chapters, in order, take place in 1912, then 2020, 2203, 2401 (plus 2195), back to 2203. Next, the Mirella and Vincent chapter is 1994 & 2007, and the Remittance chapter is 1918, 1990, 2008 (as stated), and the last chapter Anomaly is 2172 to about 2177, then 2915.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to simply mention that a nifty twist is revealed at story’s end. For some reason, no matter how many novels or movies with twists I’ve encountered, I myself almost never anticipate the twist. I usually don’t even stop to wonder if maybe there is a twist a’coming, much less guess what it is. Ironic because somewhere she writes, in reference to the pandemic probably (I can’t find the quote), something to the effect: We never saw it coming.

Miscellaneous takeaway. Sexism, at least in this novel, persists into the next century:
“And what do you do?” the other traveler asked finally.
“I write books,” Olive said.
“For children?” he asked.

More quotable quotes.
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.
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“You know the phrase I keep thinking about?" a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. "The chickens are coming home to roost.' Because it's never good chickens. It's never 'You've been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.' It's never good chickens. It's always bad chickens.”

Links--
Compilation of 34 pro reviews. 1 pan, 3 mixed, 30 rave or positive:
https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/sea...

Intriguing, detailed interview:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment...