Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel

Emily St John Mandel writes genre fiction disguised as literary fiction. Time travel and intergalactic journeys are the primary devices she employs in Sea of Tranquility to explore the ethics of humanity and the nature of reality. For those who might never pick up a science-fiction novel or even look down on such writing, Mandel loosely wraps these familiar genre tropes in a character-driven story that explores the nature of humanity suffering under the effects of pandemics throughout time.

Sea of Tranquility is a short read at two-hundred-seventy pages but spans hundreds of years of human history, from 1912 to 2041. The structure Mandel employs propels the reader speedily along this great chasm of time with short, snappy paragraphs and sentences, seemingly written for the short attention span of the average individual trained by the internet to ingest information in short, regular bursts.

Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, recently adapted by HBO, tells the story of a group of survivors of a flu pandemic. Her 2020 follow-up, The Glass Hotel, details an international Ponzi scheme; two of its characters feature prominently in Sea of Tranquility, making this a series of novels existing in the same literary universe. 

There’s a meta quality to Mandel’s writing, and Sea of Tranquility sees Mandel exploring what it’s like to be a novel, promoting a book during a pandemic. It’s a clever structure, and more so, given that Station Eleven is now seen as eerily prescient. Perhaps readers will look back at Sea of Tranquility in two hundred years and think the same of it. 

Sea of Tranquility is out now. Purchase it from your local independent bookstore today!

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