Sea of Tranquility
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Description
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Book Information
Posts
It's been a while since I read Mandel's other novel, Station Eleven but I still recall the level of immersion I felt while reading it and, happy to report, this was the case with Sea of Tranquility as well. The author excels at combining sci-fi or some other futuristic setting with heartwarming drama and an emphasis on human connections, comparable to Becky Chamber's Wayfarers series. I found myself wishing the book was longer so we could spend more time learning about the characters in different timelines. I would have found a book just about the disgraced nobleman's son and his time abroad just as enjoyable as learning more about the backstory of one of the deceased characters that is only mentioned in passing but has left a significant impact on the story and the people she loved behind. In essence, I even started caring about characters that are only there for a chapter or two - that's how good Mandel is at making you care. Reading this story post-pandemic was also quite a trip. The disease and quarantine described in 2200 could happen just as easily in the near future, if you even wanna go and think along those lines. Add to that some time-travel shenaningans and you've got an engaging plot with likable characters and will probably be on the look-out for more work by the author.
Ein tolles Buch, dem ich gerade so 5 Sterne gebe. Es hat definitiv Schwächen - aber eben auch sehr, sehr viele Stärken. Das World Building ist fantastisch und so schafft es die Autorin auch mit relativ wenigen Seiten, einen ins Buch zu ziehen. Ich war von Kapitel 1 an im Buch. Auch das Setting, Sci-Fi/Weltraumbesiedlung kombiniert mit Zeitsprüngen trifft bei mir absolut einen Nerv. Sprachlich sowieso top. Leider sind manche Dinge nicht 100% logisch, z.B. wieso einer der Protagonisten so einfach den Job im Time Institute bekommt, ohne dafür qualifiziert zu sein. Und vieles dürfte gern ausführlicher geschrieben sein. Ich würde gern noch so viel mehr über die einzelnen Handlungsstränge erfahren, bekomme es aber nicht. Dass die Autorin dieses Gefühl in mir mit so wenigen Seiten auslöst, spricht wiederum eindeutig für sie. Absolute Empfehlung.
What if space and time are just a simulation, would you care?
An adventure through time is what you get. Meeting a variety of individuals. An exiled man that lands at the shore of america to seek out a new life or an author on her book tour for her most recent successful book. 20th century through the envisioned 22th century. A story of the Corona Virus that just got up to speed. You really cannot say this book doesnt have variety. But I got the feeling that I was somehow disconnected from the writing style. The story - as your usual time travel story - is mostly expected in its sudden urge to flip everything upside down. With a slightly different style of writing and a different approach to characters i feel it could have been better.
A spectacular story about pandemics, time travel, and the fundamentals of humanity. This one hit me way harder than I expected it to. I can‘t even pinpoint what exactly made this story so emotional, but it felt extremely cathartic at times, both for the author writing it and for me reading it. I feel like I was finally able to confront some of the things that have happened in these past 2+ years and find the light at the end of the tunnel.
Was eine wunderbare Reise in ferne Welten und Zeiten! Der Schreibstil der Autorin ist einzigartig, man fliegt so durch die Geschichte hindurch. Normalerweise markiere ich Bücher nicht, dieses hier hätte ich aber seitenweise markieren und annotieren können! Ich mochte den Aufbau des Buches und die vielseitigen Charaktere, die man kennenlernen konnte. Die Ausschnitte wirken zu Beginn vielleicht ein wenig wahllos, zum Ende fügt sich aber dennoch alles. Es bleiben keine Fragen offen und das Ende wirkt überhaupt nicht wie an den Haaren herbeigezogen - im Gegenteil! Ich fand es passend und hätte es nicht besser schreiben können. Ein fantastisches Buch und eine einzigartige Reise!
4.5* Ein kurzes aber richtig tolles Buch. Das Buch ist aus verschiedenen Sichtweisen geschrieben und spielt in unterschiedlichen Zeiten, die alle toll miteinander verbunden waren. Emily St. John Mandel schreibt wie gewohnt toll und schaffte eine tolle Atmosphäre. Inhaltlich möchte ich gar nicht zu viel schreiben da es sich lohnt einfach offen in die Geschichte rein zu gehen und es zu geniessen. Ich kann jedenfalls sagen, dass mich das Ende sehr berührt hat und ich fast etwas traurig war, dass das Buch schon zu Ende war.
„Sea of Tranquility“ is a relatively short book that touches on such topics as time travel, or the theory that life is just a simulation. Because it is so short it needs to move pretty fast to cover those ideas, and this is where it fell flat for me. There are too many characters being introduced too fast for any real character development, which in turn kept me from having any connection with those characters. There was also a lot of talk about a pandemic, which felt kind of forced in just so that the author can write down her thoughts during COVID-19. It was a easy and fast read and the writing style is pretty, but all in all the story didn’t hold my interest.
The most beautifully written book I’ve read in a while, and it touches quite interesting ideas. It feels like a nice and calm conversation with a good friend. The recurring theme of pandemics threw me out of it a bit because it hit a bit to close to home. And the overarching time travel story line felt to me more like a story device to tell the sub plots than the main story itself.
A truly beautiful book. Observing all the timelines happening and seeing how they are connected is a true pleasure. This is probably one of the most interesting, captivating and comprehensible time traveling stories out there; but at the same time the plot tells so much more than just a simple sci-fi story. A travel through both time and the meaning of finding your place in life and becoming the person you want to be.✨
3.5-4 The story was great, but the execution was lacking. After I had problems getting into the story initially, I really dived in for about the first third. After that, the pacing was way off, including a jump of several years, and then so much action, so many twists were crammed into too few pages. I would have liked to have been able to settle a bit more into the settings and situations and get to know the characters further. So, the book could have easily used at least 50 pages more. Storywise, I really enjoyed how the book was set up, and the complicated plotline mostly worked - however, I still felt that the one question/suspicion that drove the story was just halfway answered, and I missed some character arcs, which should have been more resolved in my opinion. Moreover, the ending felt way too abrupt. But altogether, a (too) short and enjoying read!
Description
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Book Information
Posts
It's been a while since I read Mandel's other novel, Station Eleven but I still recall the level of immersion I felt while reading it and, happy to report, this was the case with Sea of Tranquility as well. The author excels at combining sci-fi or some other futuristic setting with heartwarming drama and an emphasis on human connections, comparable to Becky Chamber's Wayfarers series. I found myself wishing the book was longer so we could spend more time learning about the characters in different timelines. I would have found a book just about the disgraced nobleman's son and his time abroad just as enjoyable as learning more about the backstory of one of the deceased characters that is only mentioned in passing but has left a significant impact on the story and the people she loved behind. In essence, I even started caring about characters that are only there for a chapter or two - that's how good Mandel is at making you care. Reading this story post-pandemic was also quite a trip. The disease and quarantine described in 2200 could happen just as easily in the near future, if you even wanna go and think along those lines. Add to that some time-travel shenaningans and you've got an engaging plot with likable characters and will probably be on the look-out for more work by the author.
Ein tolles Buch, dem ich gerade so 5 Sterne gebe. Es hat definitiv Schwächen - aber eben auch sehr, sehr viele Stärken. Das World Building ist fantastisch und so schafft es die Autorin auch mit relativ wenigen Seiten, einen ins Buch zu ziehen. Ich war von Kapitel 1 an im Buch. Auch das Setting, Sci-Fi/Weltraumbesiedlung kombiniert mit Zeitsprüngen trifft bei mir absolut einen Nerv. Sprachlich sowieso top. Leider sind manche Dinge nicht 100% logisch, z.B. wieso einer der Protagonisten so einfach den Job im Time Institute bekommt, ohne dafür qualifiziert zu sein. Und vieles dürfte gern ausführlicher geschrieben sein. Ich würde gern noch so viel mehr über die einzelnen Handlungsstränge erfahren, bekomme es aber nicht. Dass die Autorin dieses Gefühl in mir mit so wenigen Seiten auslöst, spricht wiederum eindeutig für sie. Absolute Empfehlung.
What if space and time are just a simulation, would you care?
An adventure through time is what you get. Meeting a variety of individuals. An exiled man that lands at the shore of america to seek out a new life or an author on her book tour for her most recent successful book. 20th century through the envisioned 22th century. A story of the Corona Virus that just got up to speed. You really cannot say this book doesnt have variety. But I got the feeling that I was somehow disconnected from the writing style. The story - as your usual time travel story - is mostly expected in its sudden urge to flip everything upside down. With a slightly different style of writing and a different approach to characters i feel it could have been better.
A spectacular story about pandemics, time travel, and the fundamentals of humanity. This one hit me way harder than I expected it to. I can‘t even pinpoint what exactly made this story so emotional, but it felt extremely cathartic at times, both for the author writing it and for me reading it. I feel like I was finally able to confront some of the things that have happened in these past 2+ years and find the light at the end of the tunnel.
Was eine wunderbare Reise in ferne Welten und Zeiten! Der Schreibstil der Autorin ist einzigartig, man fliegt so durch die Geschichte hindurch. Normalerweise markiere ich Bücher nicht, dieses hier hätte ich aber seitenweise markieren und annotieren können! Ich mochte den Aufbau des Buches und die vielseitigen Charaktere, die man kennenlernen konnte. Die Ausschnitte wirken zu Beginn vielleicht ein wenig wahllos, zum Ende fügt sich aber dennoch alles. Es bleiben keine Fragen offen und das Ende wirkt überhaupt nicht wie an den Haaren herbeigezogen - im Gegenteil! Ich fand es passend und hätte es nicht besser schreiben können. Ein fantastisches Buch und eine einzigartige Reise!
4.5* Ein kurzes aber richtig tolles Buch. Das Buch ist aus verschiedenen Sichtweisen geschrieben und spielt in unterschiedlichen Zeiten, die alle toll miteinander verbunden waren. Emily St. John Mandel schreibt wie gewohnt toll und schaffte eine tolle Atmosphäre. Inhaltlich möchte ich gar nicht zu viel schreiben da es sich lohnt einfach offen in die Geschichte rein zu gehen und es zu geniessen. Ich kann jedenfalls sagen, dass mich das Ende sehr berührt hat und ich fast etwas traurig war, dass das Buch schon zu Ende war.
„Sea of Tranquility“ is a relatively short book that touches on such topics as time travel, or the theory that life is just a simulation. Because it is so short it needs to move pretty fast to cover those ideas, and this is where it fell flat for me. There are too many characters being introduced too fast for any real character development, which in turn kept me from having any connection with those characters. There was also a lot of talk about a pandemic, which felt kind of forced in just so that the author can write down her thoughts during COVID-19. It was a easy and fast read and the writing style is pretty, but all in all the story didn’t hold my interest.
The most beautifully written book I’ve read in a while, and it touches quite interesting ideas. It feels like a nice and calm conversation with a good friend. The recurring theme of pandemics threw me out of it a bit because it hit a bit to close to home. And the overarching time travel story line felt to me more like a story device to tell the sub plots than the main story itself.
A truly beautiful book. Observing all the timelines happening and seeing how they are connected is a true pleasure. This is probably one of the most interesting, captivating and comprehensible time traveling stories out there; but at the same time the plot tells so much more than just a simple sci-fi story. A travel through both time and the meaning of finding your place in life and becoming the person you want to be.✨
3.5-4 The story was great, but the execution was lacking. After I had problems getting into the story initially, I really dived in for about the first third. After that, the pacing was way off, including a jump of several years, and then so much action, so many twists were crammed into too few pages. I would have liked to have been able to settle a bit more into the settings and situations and get to know the characters further. So, the book could have easily used at least 50 pages more. Storywise, I really enjoyed how the book was set up, and the complicated plotline mostly worked - however, I still felt that the one question/suspicion that drove the story was just halfway answered, and I missed some character arcs, which should have been more resolved in my opinion. Moreover, the ending felt way too abrupt. But altogether, a (too) short and enjoying read!