The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 11 July 2022
by Emily St. John Mandel
Every once in a while, a crazy-sounding theory about our existence comes along and makes a brief splash. When it comes to contemplating the universe, the awesome magnitude of its exotic components, black holes, quasars, neutron stars, vast galactic megaclusters, the great attractor (!), is utterly fascinating, but what does it mean for the price of gas? Down here on Earth, we have to live our lives as best we can. This is a theme of the Matrix movies, after all. If we were subject to a fantastic dream reality, wouldn't we rather live there than sitting in line to buy cheap gas? One such theory holds that the information content of the universe could feasibly be mapped to a vast sphere that surrounds it. We would be, in effect, just a massive hologram of a universe. Our reality is sliding around on the surface of a giant ball. Also, given the tremendous age of the universe (nevertheless finite), we are unlikely to be the most advanced creatures around. As it stands, we like to use our computers to model the natural phenomena around us. Who is to say that some hugely advanced species, or even humans in the future, aren't running a simulation of the entire universe and that we are mere algorithms within it. Some have suggested that, when you do the math, it is actually more likely than not that this is true. Most of us would rather not believe such a thing, but how is it appreciably different from the existence of a God who knows everything and every move we are likely to make? Are we any less free? In the Matrix the sense of deja vu is taken to be a sign of the matrix itself correcting its glitches. Where else might you look for signs we are a hologram, or a computer program? Mix all that in with the global trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, and you've touched on the heart of the mind-bending novel, Sea of Tranquility.
We already know we're in a time-travel story when it opens during the era of the British Empire. The first of several protagonists of this multi-layered story is the third son of an aristocratic family who travels to western Canada to make his own way in life devoid of the inheritance entitled to his elder brother. On this journey, Edwin makes personal discoveries and experiences a psychedelic moment in the forests of Victoria Island. From there, we leap forward in time, a century, then a few centuries, to a time when there are colonies on the Moon and out on extrasolar planets. There is the book tour of a troubled author who wrote a book about a deadly pandemic, just as a new pandemic appears to be surfacing. She has a brief psychedelic experience in an interplanetary train station. There's a woman whose best friend disappeared off a ship at sea, a friend who had experienced a brief psychedelic vision in the woods that her brother would incorporate into a musical performance. These connected events concern a Time Travel institute far into the future, and situated in a city on the Moon. A man looking for purpose in life joins the institute and finds himself investigating this historical incidents as evidence of one of those strange theories about our existence.
This story is character-driven, though. The reader need not expect any hard science descriptions of how time travel works, or how the cities on Titan were built. This is, instead, and almost gentle, if mind-twisting story of an interconnectedness in time and space. We learn a lot about our protagonists, from their lost loves to the experience of a pandemic lockdown that is surely drawn from the author's experience of the (currently ongoing) COVID-19 pandemic. In that, her writing has a visceral connection to the present-day reader. A temporal time mystery nested in the anxieties of life in uncertain and uneasy times.