Sea of Tranquility

---

---

Readers of speculative fiction are likely to be familiar with Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel’s influential 2014 novel Station Eleven, now an HBO miniseries. Fans of Station Eleven, perhaps left underwhelmed by her next novel, The Glass Hotel, will be pleased to find that Sea of Tranquility returns to a broader, far-future speculative scope, continuing in Mandel’s stylistic tradition of gentle meditations on the nature of art and human connection across long, even apocalyptic, periods of time. Mandel herself has said she sees these three novels as connected, a sort of “Mandelverse” (Bethune).

Sea of Tranquility is a nested narrative that spans 489 years, the lifetimes of its characters unfolding around each other like rings in a tree or ripples in a pond, connecting in unexpected ways. It is a form reminiscent of Michael Christie’s Greenwood or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The novel begins in 1912 with Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the younger son belonging to a wealthy British familial line, who is exiled to Canada after speaking out against the British occupation of India at a dinner party. He is given “remittance money,” enough to start his own life far away from his shunning family. Eventually finding himself on Vancouver Island, Edwin experiences a strange moment in the forest, where he sees his surroundings alter around him—becoming what we later learn is the futuristic Oklahoma City Airship Terminal—and hears the music of a violin.

The next narrative ripple inward is set in 2020, where Mirella Kessler, a friend of Vincent, one of the protagonists of Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, is mourning her missing, now deceased, friend. Attending a performance by Vincent’s composer brother, Mirella sees a video that Vincent filmed as a child, which includes the same mysterious violin music in a forest. The novel then jumps to 2203, where author Olive Llewellyn, who lives on the moon, is travelling back to Earth to partake in a book tour for her pandemic novel, Marienbad. Within this fictional novel, Olive has written a scene, based on her own experience, where a character experiences the same out-of-time transportive episode with violin music as experienced by Edwin and child Vincent, only in reverse—in actuality, Olive was in the Airship Terminal and briefly saw a forest.

Olive is considered a stand-in for Mandel herself, exploring her experience of reckoning with being the author of a pandemic novel, Station Eleven, during the actual COVID-19 pandemic (Garrett). Mandel has said in interviews that Sea of Tranquility has components of autofiction in Olive’s sections, including the tender scenes where Olive is quarantined with her young daughter. Her own recent parenthood, Mandel has said, is a fundamental difference between Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, as it is “very different thinking and talking about the end of the world when you’re trying not to imagine your child being affected by it” (Bethune).    

In between Olive’s sections, the center of the novel—the heart of the temporal ripple—takes place in 2401, where Gaspery-Jacques, living in the moon’s lightless “Night City,” is brought into a clandestine investigation at the Time Institute, concerning the overlap of these violin occurrences across time. His scientist sister, Zoey, is convinced that this anomaly could be proof that reality is a simulation, saying, “If moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another…you could think of them as corrupted files” (128). Travelling through time, Gaspery-Jacques meets with Edwin, Mirella, and Olive, attempting to uncover the cause of this inexplicable site where multiple times appear to have briefly touched, like many layers of fabric pinched together. Despite being warned that interfering in someone’s preventable death in the past would have grave consequences for him, Gaspery cannot stop himself from warning Olive about the coming pandemic in her time, urging her to return to the moon and her family. She does, but in saving Olive’s life Gaspery becomes a fugitive from the Time Institute, eventually caught and sentenced to be framed for a murder in 20^th-century Ohio. The conclusion of the novel reveals woven connections between Gaspery and the rest of the timelines, including twists both surprising and satisfying, that bring the novel’s occasionally disparate strings together into a unified narrative. Leaving both Gaspery and the reader without any clear answers, Mandel concludes that “if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So wha?. A life lived in a simulation is still a life” (246).

The title Sea of Tranquility comes from a location on Earth’s moon of the same name, the Sea of Tranquility, where humans first walked on the moon, and where the first of Mandel’s imagined moon colonies is built. The notable dropping of “the” from Mandel’s title allows it to evoke the moonscape while also imagining time itself, and the timespan of the human species, as a sea of tranquility, a place floating beyond the constraints of physics, a place where human sorrows are smaller in the face of a vast yet unpredictably connected universe.  

In its nested form and literary, humanistic treatment of speculative futures, Sea of Tranquility is comparable to another 2022 novel, Seqouia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark. While Sea of Tranquility does exist within the tradition of the pandemic novel or the elegiac apocalyptic narrative—such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ling Ma’s Severance, or fellow Canadian Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow—Mandel’s novel, like Nagamatsu’s work, separates itself from the tropes of this genre through its overall optimism about human nature. What makes Sea of Tranquility unique is Mandel’s ability to imagine a deadly pandemic a human exodus to the moon and space colonies caused by climate change and overpopulation, while simultaneously emphasizing moments of beauty and hope. Sea of Tranquility is melancholic, but unlike many narratives of pandemic or apocalypse, it leaves the reader with a sense of meaning: time, it asserts, is not random or futile, but rather replete with connections we may never understand in our lifetimes, but which, nevertheless, matter.  

Sea of Tranquility, while aching and meditative, does at times suffer from being a bit underwhelming, likely due to Station Eleven’s titanic success. It is difficult for an author to follow what may be their own best work, with the standards of their audience now set astronomically high. However, through Sea of Tranquility’s nested form and her use of autofiction, Mandel manages to imbue this novel with its own standalone power. While the fragmented storytelling across time and the inclusion of time travel may put some readers off, especially those who prefer Mandel’s previous, slightly more “plausible” near-future speculative fiction, Sea of Tranquility is a daring book that ultimately succeeds at its gambles, in form and content alike. If, as Olive says to a fictional audience, “we might reasonably think of the end of the world…as a continuous and never-ending process” (190), then Emily St. John Mandel is exactly the kind of profound, defiantly hopeful writer we need to help steward us through it.

REFERENCES

Bethune, Brian. “Emily St. John Mandel can’t stop writing about pandemics.” Interview with Emily St. John Mandel. Maclean’s. 7 Apr. 2022, macleans.ca/culture/emily-st-john-mandel-cant-stop-writing-about-pandemics/.

Garrett, Yvonne C. “Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility.” The Brooklyn Rail. Apr. 2022, brooklynrail.org/2022/04/books/Emily-St-John-Mandels-Sea-of-Tranquility/.

M. E. Boothby is a Ph.D. candidate at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, where their research explores intersections of queerness, neurodiversity studies, and material ecocriticism in speculative fiction. They write both academically and creatively about apocalyptic fungi, sentient cephalopods, monstrous children, and more-than-human communication. Their work has been published in Horseshoe Literary Magazine, Untethered Magazine, Paragon, Gothic Nature, and Fantastika Journal.