80 Scientific American, April 2022
RECOMMENDED
Edited by Amy Brady
Sea of
Tranquility
by Emily St. John
Mandel.
Knopf, 2022 ($25)Peel away the speculative skin of Emily
St. John Mandel’s latest novel—the time
travel, the moon colonies, the Möbius strip
of a plot that, against all odds, holds to gether
until the very last page—and what’s left is
something much more vulnerable: a story
about grief. In this moment of unbearable
negative space, of sputtering pandemic dis-
ruptions and mind-numbing stasis, Mandel
has written a eulogy for our half-lived years.
Sea of Tranquility, which forms a loose
triptych alongside Mandel’s two most
recent novels, The Glass Hotel and Station
Eleven, opens with a scene of exile: It is
1912, and Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the
recently banished son of a well-to-do
British family, is “hauling the weight of his
double-sainted name across the Atlantic
by steamship.” His destination is the east-
ern coast of Canada. He has no concrete
plans, no real sense of purpose, and even-
tually he will find himself on the other side
of the country, wandering through a forest
in British Columbia, where, in a flash of
weirdness, the first hints of this novel’s
true scope in space and time are revealed.
In subsequent chapters the narrative
hops from Edwin’s story to almost present-
day New York City (where Mandel wrote
this novel during the COVID pandemic, the
sound of ambulance sirens surely at times
a near-constant companion), then to a
future moon colony, with multiple stops
along the way. At first all that holds these
disparate threads together is the sense
that something is off, an almost impercep-
tible tear in the fabric of time. Eventually
the threads begin crossing, and it becomes
impossible not to keep reading to see how
these story lines will converge.
The most visceral and immediate of the
novel’s narrative threads concerns a writer
named Olive Llewellyn, who when we first
meet her has temporarily left her family
behind on one of the moon colonies to
come to Earth for a book tour on the eve
of a new global pandemic. To her credit,
Mandel makes no effort at coyness—it is
pretty clear that many of Olive’s experi-
ences mirror her own, from having to grind
through countless bizarre interview ques-
tions (“What’s your favorite alibi?” one
interviewer enthusiastically asks Olive,
as though we all carry one around in our
back pocket in case of emergencies) to the
crushing weight of days spent on the road
and the simple desire to just go back home.
These passages alone are worth the price
of admission, not so much for voyeuristic
extrapolation about how much of this bookis really disguised memoir but rather for
the pitch-perfect descriptions of the writ-
ing life, both before and during COVID.
The past few months have seen the
birth of what might be called the first full
generation of pandemic-era novels—
books such as Neal Stephenson’s Ter
mination Shock, Hanya Yanagihara’s
To Paradise and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s
How High We Go in the Dark. Whether
these books were written before the
COVID era or not, they are now destined
to be read in the shadow of the present
moment, just as any novel released
between 2017 and 2021 that touched even
tangentially on authoritarianism was inevi-
tably read in the shadow of Trump.
In some cases, the plagues that hauntF I C T I O N
Half-Lived
Years
A sci-fi novel where
the grief of pandemic
stasis transcends
time and space
Review by Omar El Akkad
Illustration by London Ladd