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For a sweeping saga where time travel threads together hundreds of years of human follies and fruition, the greatest moment of time travel in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility was the way she transports the reader from opening the book to being two hours into the future and deep into the book as if in the blink of an eye. Her prose is practically a time portal that grips you in its gravity and sends your mind soaring across cosmos of thought. A single moment seemingly unstitched from time of melodic violin music echoing across an airship hangar bay of the future knits together four stops along the timeline between early 20th century Canadian wilderness to a far-flung future as humanity colonizes the deep-reaches of space and puts corporate control over visits to the past. As the varied and uniquely interesting cast of characters converge around this snag in the fabric of time, the juxtapositions of their lives and anxieties amalgamate into a cohesive portrait of humanity fraught with existential examinations into the nature of reality and eternally wary they are teetering on the brink of extinction. Because �no star burns forever.� Written during the Covid pandemic, Mandel incorporates her own experiences as an author of a pandemic novel alongside musings on illness and isolation that really hit hard. It is a thoughtful book, epic in its scope yet succinct in its delivery with a propulsive plotline that, despite a few potholes on the road of pacing, is impossible to put down. With a deft maneuverability across genres, Sea of Tranquility is endlessly engaging in examinations of life in the face of death, humanity against the landscape of expanding history and the inner struggles of morality, fear, and survival that we all share.

�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.�

There is a really moving moment early on when fictional author Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour in 2203 in the days leading up to a global pandemic which has a rather auto-fictional flair to it considering Mandel’s own experience discussing her earlier novel, Station Eleven, in light of an upcoming television adaptation as Covid began. Amidst a lot of rather misogynist comments on her as a career author, amidst missing her family and amidst spending all day �talking about the end of the world while trying not to imagine the world ending with her daughter in it,� she meets a fan who reveals having a tattoo from her novel. Which is always a cool thing, I mean every one of my tattoos are of favorite authors or novels though I’ve never gotten to show the authors (alas, Virginia Woolf is no longer alive). But in 2019, Emily St. John Mandel came to our town for the local Big Read and a librarian coworker of mine got to show Mandel that she had a tattoo from Station Eleven, the quote �Survival Is Insufficient.� In the book, Mandel’s fictional stand-in Olive mentions having seen several of these tattoos but each leaving a strong impression, but it felt really cool to suddenly come across this passage and see how reality and fiction on the page brush against each other.

�You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.�

While many put books and authors on this pedestal of celebrity, it is lovely to remember they are people just like you and I and that the same emotions, fears, joys, loves, and losses that whirlwind through our own hearts are also the storms through which they harness their own stories. It’s why fiction can be so personal and universal at the same time and become an imaginary landscape where we can share our feelings and remember we are not alone.

�I wouldn’t have written this book if not for the pandemic,� Emily St. John Mandel admitted in an . The fears of illness, isolation, and the uncertainty of the future that assailed us all cast a long shadow over Sea of Tranquility, which features a visit not only to the days leading up to our 2020 pandemic but also a fictional “Sars Twelve� pandemic 200 years from now. � Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic,� Olive says in a presentation on her book, �there’s an awful randomness about it,� and that is felt in each of the novel’s eras as each character seems to find themselves on the cutting edge of history but also fearful that edge might be the final cliff. As Madel says in her , living right by the Brooklyn hospital during Covid had her �working against a backdrop of constant ambulance sirens� in a city where � it’s not an overstatement to say that there was an atmosphere of death,� and this experience is writ large on many portions of the novel. Particularly the way our lives can suddenly be disrupted, how the pandemic can seem far off then suddenly its too late and you or someone you know is sick:

�Pandemics don't approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorienting. The pandemic is far away, and then it's all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.�

There is also the rather incongruous feelings of the quiet and isolation, where �life can be tranquil in the face of death� as Olive is home with her daughter. Olive, Mandel admits, was where the novel began through exercises in auto-fiction. � I wanted to write about the strangeness of the tour experience, so I’d been playing around with autofiction in the months leading up to the pandemic,� she says, �then the pandemic hit, and it seemed to me that it might be interesting to look at the autofiction through a sci-fi lens and combine it with the time travel.� An uneasy feeling of end times at any moment is a pervading anxiety in each part of the novel, such as characters remarking on the oddity of a building lease that had an option to renew after ten thousand years and the hubris of �thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years.� This struggle to get us ten, hundreds or more thousands of years into a future becomes a major theme in Sea of Tranquility as it boldly reaches into a kaleidoscopic narratives of weaving timelines and cause and effect decision making that will have you eagerly turning pages.

�Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?�

Fans of the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell will detect some similarities with the novel. It follows a very similar structure with half a narrative telescoping into the future before coming back (a style Mitchell described as putting a mirror at the halfway point of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino) and follows a rather similar character order: travelling on a boat, composer, book tour. This is intentional. �It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read both books that one of my very favorite novels is Cloud Atlas,� Mandel >has said, �I’ve always admired the scope of that book, and wanted to try something similar with Sea of Tranquility.� The two novels have very different purposes and themes so the similarities won’t affect the enjoyment. She also uses Mitchell’s style of character cameos, such as the cast of her The Glass Hotel showing up in the second section (no need to have read it to understand this one thought). Plus it was interesting to learn that the character Edwin St John St Andrew (the similar character to Mitchell’s Adam Ewing) is loosely based on Mandel’s own relative as she told Waterstones:

�He’s based very loosely on a great-grandparent of mine, Newell St. Andrew St. John, who emigrated from the UK as a remittance man in the early years of the 20th century and failed rather spectacularly to make a go of it in Canada.�

Failing spectacularly is a big part of this book too, though the book itself is quite a success. Sure, there are some pacing issues and plotholes conveniently covered by plot armor, but it is an ambitious novel that executes the turns and twists with precision and sticks the landing. I did have a laugh, however, when a character complains to Olive that the climax of her book �could have been a much bigger moment,� because I had the SAME complaint about the end of Station Eleven. But it also seems a common issue I have with her novels because a big decision made in this book feels like it wasn’t given the tension and wrestling with morality space enough. No spoilers, but Gaspery-Jacques does spend 5 years training for something and working on psychological training to not be disruptive and then IMMEDIATELY does what he isn’t supposed to do and it sticks out like a sore thumb on the novel. It’s also a major engine for making the latter half work though and �sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin.� So that's fair.

�Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?�

This is a novel where the less you know about the later half the better because one the plot starts to fall into motion its a pretty direct line to the solutions of the mysteries despite all the twists and turns that keep it obsessively interesting. Time travel is pretty central to the novel and �what is time travel if not a security problem?� which makes space for some rather great looks at the ideas of safety and control in a futuristic setting. There are moon colonies, one where the sky is burnt out so it is constantly night which was some imagery that I really adored here, there are strict time travel laws, and while you don’t get to learn much about the government you get a sense that things are pretty tightly reigned in and regulated to keep people safe. It is a very bureaucratic future and, as a character warms �what you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.� This makes a large theme in the book, but also the closest thing to a villain the narrative gets.

�The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.�

Without getting into spoiler territory, an interesting theory is presented midway through the novel about the nature of reality. The answer to it remains a bit elusive even by the end, though it is less a lack of conclusive evidence and more that it is—for the purposes of the novel and character—beside the point with what she is trying to say. Still, there are some rather interesting tidbits throughout the novel. Edwin’s complaint that �the sky is aggressively blue,� for instance recalls the bright blue of Moon Colony One’s dome sky. But this also is an aspect how the landscape and the world are rather oppressive and threatening, or just rather off. �[Victoria is] It’s a far-distant simulation of England,� Edwin notes, �a watercolor superimposed unconvincingly on the landscape.� And then there are the prairies which reminds me a bit of Gerald Murnane’s The Plains: �the prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong.� It all leads Edwin to conclude �this place is indifference…this place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies,� which reveals a large theme of the novel that the world is a threatening place where the land, the weather, and more can all kill you and pandemics can creep up on any horizon.

�If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.�

�We might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never-ending process,� Olive states in Sea of Tranquility and across each era of the novels we find characters locked into a life of chance amidst the elements. Still, Sea of Tranquility champions the human heart full of determination to find a way to survive and Emily St. John Mandel has crafted a fun-filled and time travel thriller across pandemics and moon colonies that confronts our fear of life up against our desire to explore, create, and continue forth into the unknown future. A well-knitted tangle of timelines and characters with a rather fun sci-fi engine to drive the narrative, Sea of Tranquility is so engaging I finished the whole thing in two sittings and can’t wait to read more of her work. A heartfelt examination of the human condition, an auto-fictional portrait of a woman at work and the pandemic that inspired it, and a rip-roaring story of life finding a way.

4.5/5

�I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.�