Beyond Reality discussion

Share your thoughts here about Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel! Spoilers allowed here!

I'm a fan of Emily St. John Mandel, and a fan of time travel stories, so this one was right in my wheelhouse. It felt odd to start a science fiction story more than 100 years in the past, but we clearly got to see time advancing to the present day and onward to moon colonies and beyond. It's nice to see than even in another couple of hundred years, people are still basically people, with family concerns and human decency still intact.

Several people have mentioned the pandemic angle, and can certainly understand that this might be triggering for some. From my point of view, however, it was only one of many plot elements. It certainly didn't create the same urgency and anxiety as another of her books, Station Eleven, for example.

This is the 5th Emily St. John Mandel book I've read, which is a bit odd seeing as I wasn't really a fan of any of the others, but this one I really liked.

I enjoyed the whole story, all the characters, all the eras, and the ending was fantastic. I liked that I knew some of the characters from the previous book, that each different year was a completely created setting, all interesting in their own way. And you need to really pay attention, as everything you learn is required to understand the end of the book.

Yes, this is indeed one to pay attention to. I do hope I get a chance to reread it soon.

Slow burn to a surprise ending! I liked it, but I was confused about when the science fiction would start. So, I wonder who programmed the simulation? 🤔

Well, I thought that was just fantastic. Having read this alongside Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun made me delight in the fact that the science fiction genre is in good hands as we stagger through the 2020s.

The worldbuilding quibble I mentioned in the "first impressions" thread was I thought her world of 2203 wasn't different enough. We have 180 years of continuing acceleration in technology ahead of us and 2203 will surely be incomprehensibly weird. Still, I find her specific vision of a divided America spot on. A lot will have to change, soon, for that not to happen. In the end, of course, the tech thing was a quibble indeed, and ultimately inconsequential.

And as an aside, Chapter 10 of the final part hit me… hard.

aPriL does feral sometimes wrote: "Slow burn to a surprise ending! I liked it, but I was confused about when the science fiction would start. So, I wonder who programmed the simulation? 🤔"

I felt like maybe there was no simulation, or in any case that she left that probably unanswerable question unanswered on purpose.

10/10
This story sort of crept up on me, and then I found I couldn’t stop reading. So evocative. Such richly drawn characters; even if they are only in a few scenes, they seem very real to the reader. The author deftly weaves some deeply complex themes into the story and I will be thinking about them for some time.
This was my first book by this author.