“…because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.”
Thankfully, Emily St. John Mandel also makes the choice to not get bogged down in discussing time travel. Hell, the last Avengers movie probably does more dissection of the implications and intricacies of time travel than Sea of Tranquility, and I mean that as a compliment. I think Sea of Tranquility is a great example of a “soft science fiction” story in the vein of movies like Her or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It doesn’t get lost in the woods of the scientific or technical concepts, and instead tells a very compelling story of these different lives across time that intersect in a way that doesn’t feel too convenient or forced.
I read Station Eleven just last year and it was easily my favorite read of 2023. I knew it took place in a semi post-apocalyptic world after a global pandemic, a setting I should probably be tired of by now, but always manages to pull me back in. I tried to go into Sea of Tranquility with even less of an idea of what it was about. From the title I knew it had something to do with the moon, and that was about it.
Just by glancing at the chapter list at the beginning, you see that the narrative starts in the early 20th century and goes forward into the far future, before returning to the start. What starts as an almost eerie mystery eventually unravels into the story of one time traveller and their impact on the lives of three people seperated by hundreds of years. It was especially interesting reading the perspectives of two characters being caught up in a pandemic, one real and the other fictional, after having read Station Eleven. It feels a lot more personal and focused in that aspect, which makes sense considering it was written in the height of Covid-19.
Overall, I think it is a very good read and one I may need to revisit after reading The Glass Hotel, which apparently connects quite a bit to this.