About Today’s Title

Ah, late October - time for apple cider, cinnamon donuts, mulled wine, ghosts, goblins and trick-or-treaters. And for attending the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. If you’re a crotchety old senior like me then maybe your first midnight movie experience was a night out with high school friends to see the mildly risque (it seemed so much more risque back in the 1970s) musical.

Today’s title comes from the signature song, and the dance it inspired, from that movie. Perfect for the season, and perfect for today’s book, which features some time warping of its own. If it’s been a while since you’ve done the Time Warp, you can find the movie version of the song in this YouTube video.

Sea of Tranquility is Emily St. John Mandel’s follow-up to her enormously successful Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. I have to confess that I’ve not read either of those, but I was a big fan of the HBO miniseries made from Station Eleven. This follow-up was written during the COVID pandemic, and among the many themes it explores are pandemics and how people react to them.

Primarily though this is a book about human connections, and then also time travel. It raises big questions - are we real, or is what we perceive as reality all a giant computer simulation being run by beings whose intellect we can’t begin to comprehend? Why do we love who we love, and how do we cope when that love is smashed to bits and proven false? How do we build a new life out of the ruins of an old life? When illness is all around us, who or what do we cling to? Would we go out of our way to help a stranger out of a sense that what is about to happen to them is an injustice?

We’re taken through a set of stories, with stops in different centuries, and introduced to different people at each stop. But all the stories are connected by an odd fleeting moment one of the people experiences. It’s a momentary sensation of being somewhere else. Each of these people describe the same sensations, the same place, and the same events that they saw in that moment.

We eventually learn that this might be a glitch in time. As one of the characters who is trying to figure it all out in the 23rd century says, “If moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another, then, well, one way you could think of those moments…is to think of them as corrupted files.” Corrupted files in a computer simulation? And so, this set of characters sets off to try to understand what that connecting moment is all about.

One character in particular gets the assignment to travel through time and try to piece together an answer. What he finds may or may not answer all the big questions, but he does find answers in the human connections he makes along the way.

This book is beautifully written, and captivated me from the first chapter. It takes some time to peel back the layers and get to the heart of the book, which can lead to moments where you wonder what exactly is going on, but I found it well worth the effort.

While there are science-fiction-y elements to the story, in the end they are just the framework for the human tale that Mandel unfolds. The back cover summary says of this novel that it’s “as human and tender as it is intellectually playful” - a perfect description.

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: A beautifully written layered novel with time-travelling bones that tells captivating storis of human connections with a glitch-in-time in common.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I borrowed the ebook through the Libby app.