Book Review: Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel

Is it possible to write a time-travel story which makes sense? Probably not - but this comes close!

It's a bit of a slow-burn; not revealing its secrets until it is good and ready. If you've read a lot of time-hopping sci-fi you won't find anything too surprising; nothing can escape the long shadow of La Jetée. It is a lushly plotted and surprisingly prosaic look at the reality of living on the moon and investigating the nature of reality.

Even for a sci-fi book, I found some of the leaps a little hard to accept. Is a mysterious "Time Institute" simply going to let a barely employable detective into their ranks just because he really wants to go gallivanting in time? Sensibly, the book doesn't get bogged down in any technobabble - so it's left to us to imagine the ways in which this particular universe works.

Every book written in the last few years is about Covid. That's just the immutable law of fiction now. I wonder how dated books like this will become when (I hope) the pandemic is a distant memory.

It's a pleasant enough tale, if a little meandering. The post-script is a delight, but I felt the book needed more urgency, heft, or existential dread. It sort of flutters through a dream-state of interesting ideas without landing on any one in particular.