Henk's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility
Sea of Tranquility
by
by
Enjoyable snippets of life that are tied together via time travel. Far from hardcore science fiction, the focus of the author is on human connection, serendipity, free will and morality
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.
More like 3.5 stars, and very serendipitous how closely some of the core messages of the book, on duty to future people and the weight of choices in the now, are to this recent YouTube video of Kurtzgesagt: https://youtu.be/LEENEFaVUzU
While reading Sea of Tranquility I felt kind of like being immersed in the movie Interstellar. Emily St. John Mandel takes us on a fascinating and daring travel through time, following several characters. I immediately felt a connection and liking towards Edwin, characterised by the author in the following manner: Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia -and He likes to buy things he doesn’t really need.
He is a shunned younger son of a noble British family (after a rather epic rant that includes this comment: William the Conqueror was a thousand years ago, Bert. Surely we might strive to be somewhat more civilized than the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider), send to Canada. There he encounters a strange phenomena in the woods.
To tell too much of the modern timelines is to spoil a bit of the fun, but characters from The Glass Hotel feature prominently in the 2000's timeline, making me giddy to see the author building a kind of meta novel comparable to David Mitchell his "Mitchell"verse. Chapter 5 captures the experience of lockdown and zoom calls very well.
A constant throughout time is that humans remain flawed, and aware of their character weaknesses without a feeling of agency (or pure bravery) to change circumstances: … whereas by eleven I already had the first suspicions that I might not be exactly the kind of person I wanted to be
This seems the key, and the heart of the novel and the wider oeuvre of the author, expressed most purely in this thought of one of the characters: If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty go pull them from the water.
Also the general morality of time travel, and knowing everyone’s fate (but not being able to interfere) is well done.
What is time travel if not a security concern? a character muses, and the dynamics are unexplained (can one travel into the future for instance?), I think that the scenario in The Anomaly, the Prix Concourt winner, with the government hushing up something so momentous as time travel, is more likely.
Also I highly question that 200 years in the future people still use coins, or 400 years later, with exoplanet colonies underway, people are still being hired (instead of AI video surveillance) for security. In this 25th century St. John Mandel even has someones mom working at a post office, and there are still iris scans and people leaving each other voicemails. I can also hardly imagine someone just be allowed to emigrate when having worked on a time machine and having temporal privileged information.
Still, Sea of Tranquility is a quick paced novel with real heart, big questions and an ambitious scope, and I warmly round my appreciation for the novel up to four stars!
Quotes:
It’s hard to know what we know sometimes, isn’t it?
When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?
No star burns forever.
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.
More like 3.5 stars, and very serendipitous how closely some of the core messages of the book, on duty to future people and the weight of choices in the now, are to this recent YouTube video of Kurtzgesagt: https://youtu.be/LEENEFaVUzU
While reading Sea of Tranquility I felt kind of like being immersed in the movie Interstellar. Emily St. John Mandel takes us on a fascinating and daring travel through time, following several characters. I immediately felt a connection and liking towards Edwin, characterised by the author in the following manner: Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia -and He likes to buy things he doesn’t really need.
He is a shunned younger son of a noble British family (after a rather epic rant that includes this comment: William the Conqueror was a thousand years ago, Bert. Surely we might strive to be somewhat more civilized than the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider), send to Canada. There he encounters a strange phenomena in the woods.
To tell too much of the modern timelines is to spoil a bit of the fun, but characters from The Glass Hotel feature prominently in the 2000's timeline, making me giddy to see the author building a kind of meta novel comparable to David Mitchell his "Mitchell"verse. Chapter 5 captures the experience of lockdown and zoom calls very well.
A constant throughout time is that humans remain flawed, and aware of their character weaknesses without a feeling of agency (or pure bravery) to change circumstances: … whereas by eleven I already had the first suspicions that I might not be exactly the kind of person I wanted to be
This seems the key, and the heart of the novel and the wider oeuvre of the author, expressed most purely in this thought of one of the characters: If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty go pull them from the water.
Also the general morality of time travel, and knowing everyone’s fate (but not being able to interfere) is well done.
What is time travel if not a security concern? a character muses, and the dynamics are unexplained (can one travel into the future for instance?), I think that the scenario in The Anomaly, the Prix Concourt winner, with the government hushing up something so momentous as time travel, is more likely.
Also I highly question that 200 years in the future people still use coins, or 400 years later, with exoplanet colonies underway, people are still being hired (instead of AI video surveillance) for security. In this 25th century St. John Mandel even has someones mom working at a post office, and there are still iris scans and people leaving each other voicemails. I can also hardly imagine someone just be allowed to emigrate when having worked on a time machine and having temporal privileged information.
Still, Sea of Tranquility is a quick paced novel with real heart, big questions and an ambitious scope, and I warmly round my appreciation for the novel up to four stars!
Quotes:
It’s hard to know what we know sometimes, isn’t it?
When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?
No star burns forever.
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