Sea of Tranquility

Emily St John Mandel is brilliant at speculative fiction that feels close and personal, which is hard to do when the scope is as large as it is in this novel. I also loved the way the story came together; I've rarely been so satisfied as I was with this ending!

This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.

Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story… show more.

This is the kind of book that makes me wish I could crawl into the author’s brain and wander around. I’m not normally a science fiction reader, but something about this book called to me and I’m so glad I listened.

It’s beautifully written and takes us through 500 years by following along with characters who are grappling with the (very current) ties of family. There’s so much intelligent wit in this book, along with incredibly relatable emotion. It’s truly unlike anything else I’ve ever read. 

I really enjoyed this book, and so did everyone in my book group.

With so many details and subplots that the author weaves into the novel, you’ll want to go back for a second read to really absorb how she mixed sci-fi and time travel elements into historical and futuristic settings.

I’m a fan of the slow build. I had started the author’s earlier novel, Station Eleven, but put it down because of all the different subplots and dizzying time shifts. By contrast, I found Sea of Tranquility a joy to read with its greater focus on intriguing characters… show more.

I’m a big fan of Emily St. John Mandel, and when COVID emerged, I reread her novel Station Eleven in almost horror as well as appreciation. How could she have known and forecast?

In Sea of Tranquility, not only is one of the characters living into the start of a pandemic but grappling with a past that comes to her not in the usual manner but through time. Furthermore, she was able to weave in timelines from the early 20th century and the future, bringing characters in and out of each others’ lives seamlessly. We see the cause… show more.

The speculative world that Mandel builds in Sea of Tranquility involves populations of humans who live in colonies on the moon.

But this is not really a novel about life on the moon. This is a time travel story that had to be set a couple hundred years in the future, and the moon colonies are, naturally, a part of human life in that time period.

The characters’ experience of life in a moon colony is ancillary to the time travel story; Mandel gives us just enough to make it seem real and true.