Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel, 2022
Science fiction Contemporary fiction
A pandemic, a moon colony, a detective slipping through time: Mandel's novel asks whether a life is still real if it's being watched.
Feels like melancholy. About time.
A page from the book
The gravestone that undoes a man who loves graveyards.
A year before I began my training at the Time Institute, I went to a dinner party at my friend Ephrem’s place. He was just back from a vacation on Earth, and he had a story about going on a walk in a cemetery with his daughter, Meiying, who was four at the time. Ephrem was an arborist. He liked to go to old cemeteries to look at the trees. But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl, Ephrem told me, and he just wanted to leave after that. He was used to graveyards, he sought them out, he’d always said he didn’t find them depressing, just peaceful, but that one grave just got to him. He looked at it and was unbearably sad. Emily St. John Mandel.The title refers to a real lunar plain where Apollo 11 landed in 1969; in the novel it becomes the site of the first moon colony.
Books that feel like this
More by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel, 2014
A flu wipes out most of humanity; a travelling Shakespeare troupe survives. Mandel's novel is about art, fame, and what we carry when everything else is gone.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Sea of Tranquility like?
- Feels like melancholy. About time.
- What should I read after Sea of Tranquility?
- If you liked Sea of Tranquility, try Dark Matter (Blake Crouch), The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury) and Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi).
A taste of the feed
The moment your routine life becomes fundamentally precarious.
No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting. No time to flinch or brace.
Dark Matter · Blake Crouch
Grief is easier to hide from strangers than from the people who love you.
Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold · Toshikazu Kawaguchi
The moment you realise time isn’t passing but turning in circles.
—Qué quería —murmuró—, el tiempo pasa. —Así es,—dijo Úrsula—, pero no tanto. Al decirlo, tuvo conciencia de estar dando la misma réplica que recibió del coronel Aureliano Buendía en su celda de sentenciado, y una vez más se estremeció con la comprobación de que el tiempo no pasaba, como ella lo acababa de admitir, sino que daba vueltas en redondo.
One Hundred Years of Solitude · Gabriel García Márquez
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