Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, published amid the COVID-19 pandemic, examines the themes of human existence and perseverance during a crisis. Woven inside these themes, however, is the bigger metaphysical question of what constitutes or doesn’t constitutes time and reality. Are we living in a simulation? Is reality real? If life is all but a simulation, is human flourishing still possible?
In a little more than 270 pages, Mandel transports you through four distinct periods (1912, 2020, 2203, and 2401) while narrating the tale of three characters who experience the same abnormal phenomena at various points in time and one detective who investigates this anomaly. The interconnectedness between these periods is what makes the book very enthralling. As the story unfolds, the logic and sequence become more explicit, revealing the author’s purpose.
If you are a science fiction fan and love such topics as space colonization and time travel, you will enjoy reading this book. However, you will probably benefit from reading The Glass Hotel first as some overlapping characters appear in both books (which I learned later).
Here is my favorite quote from the book: “…as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
And one more related to public health: “It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?”
