Oh... I loved this. It was weird and it did not always work on a strictly technical level. It is incredibly meta and referential of St John Mandel's other books, so it will hit less hard and probably work less for people not familiar with The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven. But it is time travel, and god I love time travel. As with The Glass Hotel, at a certain point I was so swept up by the achievement of this book that I just cried my way through the last pages out of an emotion best described as respect. Her books are just for me. Something about growing up in British Columbia has created a common terroir between myself and the author. We are grapes grown from the same soil. I read her books and, on a soul level, feel at home.

Station Eleven is the pandemic novel that St John Mandel published just before the COVID pandemic hit. Station Eleven was also the first thing I picked up when the pandemic hit, and for the reasons this book identifies, I found it cathartic. This book, Sea of Tranquility, is also a pandemic novel, one that is extremely emphatic about a future. It is meta about this. There's a line in the middle of what certainly seems to be a bit of autofiction—a woman not unlike Mandel is doing a book tour to promote her pandemic novel when a pandemic hits, but in the 2200s—where the fictional author says autofiction isn't really her thing. That's how many layers of irony deep this book is.

The book doesn't hit its stride until this 2203 section, but here begins what I assume is the "deranged" science fiction novella referenced by fictional author Olive, who is definitely not Emily St John Mandel, in a reflective interview on the development of her pandemic book. Olive is the eventual heart of the story, the voice for the ways we've all been forced to appreciate life after courting lockdowns and death and risk for so long. SpoilerHer life is saved through the events of the plot to allow her to deliver the message of the pandemic novel to the reader. It shouldn't work. Maybe it doesn't work. But through all these meta layers, it worked for me.

The novel orients around the question: what is a life well lived? It concludes that a life well lived is a life lived at all, no matter its form. I liked this about the novel. SpoilerOne character concludes that he might tend to his garden, and this might be enough. Another concludes that the risk of grave consequences is worth it just to have a job he cares about. Another mourns a friend she hasn't spoken to in years, whom she has every reason to resent, years after they both fell from grace, but mourns her because she lived, and later died. There was a message here I really appreciated: Who cares if life is a simulation? A simulated life is still a life lived. And this, too, is relevant to the pandemic, and communicating virtually, and part of how we process the inherent loneliness of the age we're in: even in digital, simulated forms, we live. We interact with each other, we teach, we learn, we play, we talk. We shape the world, our friends, ourselves just by existing, digitally or physically. This is living. It's okay.

I liked this novel for the ways it offers the pandemic-novel catharsis promised by its own pages. It's important that this novel is speculative, future-looking. The histories of pandemics, and the idea that the world is always ending and yet forever persisting, is also crucial. We are travelling through time. The characters are travelling through time. I don't know. This was a fragmented and turned-around book that referenced its own canon and our own timeline too much, and I loved it so much. I read it in a day and I'll read it again.