“If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be so what... A life lived in a simulation is still a life.” [p. 246]
In 1912 second son Edwin St John St Andrew, exiled to British Columbia for his embarrassing anticolonial views, wanders into a forest and experiences a moment of darkness, motion, an echoing violin. Almost immediately afterwards he encounters the new priest, who is interested in what Edwin might have found beneath the trees. In 2020 Mirella Kessler attends the premier of a new work by composer Paul James Smith, whose work is accompanied by a video shot by his dead sister Vincent. The video contains a glitch of some kind, a moment of darkness, a violin, a whooshing noise ... Two centuries later, novelist Olive Llewelyn, born in the Moon colonies, is touring Earth to promote her new novel. There are rumours of a pandemic, and she's already homesick. A passage in her novel tells of a moment of darkness, motion, an echoing violin and a forest: one interviewer is very interested in this episode. And two centuries after that, in 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts discovers that his sister Zoey works at the Time Institute, and is investigating a case of corruption...
This novel reminded me strongly of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, though I have a feeling, vague because 17 years separate them, that I enjoyed Sea of Tranquility more. There is, unsurprisingly, time travel, with all its attendant paradoxes and loops and security problems; there is the simulation hypothesis; there is, inescapably, a pandemic. (This novel was written in the first year of Covid-19.) And it examines elements of pandemic and post-pandemic life: the exhaustion of virtual meetings -- 'turns out reality is more important than we thought' -- and the oddness of being in a room with another person, the opportunities for fresh starts, the sense of the world ending ('What if it always is the end of the world?' asks Olive) and the strangely enticing prospect of a post-apocalyptic future with less technology...
Sea of Tranquility is a good science fiction novel, with glimpses of marvellous futures (the Far Colonies! the Night City!): and it is also a thoroughly humane and compassionate story, about connections made and lost, about mercy, about the importance of art. I liked it very much, and it inspired me to read more of Mandel's work, which I've been acquiring steadily -- but for some reason not getting around to reading -- since Station Eleven.
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