Carolyn Walsh 's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

** spoiler alert ** This is a wonderful, perplexing novel of soaring imagination. It draws on speculative physics, metaphysics, and science fiction in an original, thought-provoking manner. What if what we consider our reality is actually a manufactured simulation? The controls carry a glitch (or file corruption) that bleeds or melds together moments from the past, present, and future for an instant over the centuries. The theory is with the advance of holograms and virtual reality; this is a technical possibility far in the future. Perhaps the sounds, smells, the people, and the world we see around us, and what we consider the reality of our lives is only a simulation.

In 1912, Edwin St. Andrew was exiled from his family's estate in England and is now living as a remittance man in the wilderness of British Columbia. He is indolent and spends his time wandering in the forest. He is shocked to hear violin music played in an airship terminal, falls ill, and believes he has suffered hallucinations. He is questioned by a man impersonating a priest.

In 2020, a young girl filming old-growth trees experienced an anomaly, disrupting time and place.

Olive Llewellen lives on Moon Colony 2 in the year 2203. She is on a book tour scheduled to take her through the colonies and Earth to promote her pandemic novel that has become a bestseller. This is the beginning of a deadly pandemic, soon to lead to lengthy lockdowns and death.

In the future, at about 2400, a hotel security guard, Gaspery, is finding his work boring. He has learned that his sister and a boyhood friend are employed in prominent positions at the Time Institute. He manages to get accepted there and is given an assignment after lengthy training. Time travel has already been invented but is mainly outlawed. Problems have arisen from time travellers making mistakes or breaking the rules, altering timelines. The Time Institute works at restoring these changes. Those charged are imprisoned or made to vanish.

Gaspery's assignment is to go back in time to different years and places and interview the man playing the violin and three others who have experienced the anomalies. He must be impartial and resist any urges to better his subjects' futures. Can he overcome his humanity? Can he solve what is causing the glitches or disruptions?

Many thanks to NetGalley, HarperCollins Canada, and Sarah Gregory for this splendid, memorable, mind-boggling book.