(Nala recommends that you read this book...)
Olive is a novelist in 2203. Born and raised on a lunar colony, she is on a book tour of Earth just as a pandemic is spreading across the planet. In a lecture near the end of Sea of Tranquility, she utters one of the most consoling thoughts I have read recently:
‘ – and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world. […]
‘But all of this raises an interesting question,’ Olive said. ‘What if it always is the end of the world? […]
‘Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world […] as a continuous and never-ending process.’
Sea of Tranquility is an elegantly constructed novel which encompasses almost five hundred years of human history with the lightest of touches. In 1912, Edwin St John St Andrew is a ‘remittance man’, a younger son of a wealthy British family sent off to the colonies to keep him out of the way, experiences something strange and inexplicable in a Canadian forest. This experience links him with Vincent in 1994, a young girl who films the anomaly, and her friend Mirella; with Alan, a violinist in an airship terminal in 2200; and with Olive. What can it signify?
The novel moves through time until 2401 when an investigation is launched. Then we move backwards again, with a new understanding of the earlier sections, until we reach the final revelation. The neatness of the structure, the resolution and the way the elements of the novel are related to each other create a lovely feeling of harmony. The book’s disclosures about time and existence are not exactly radical, but beautifully expressed through the stories of particular, fallible, likeable people. The sweep of history may be grand and impersonal, but what matters is us, always on the cusp of loss; the texture of our daily lives, our loves and griefs. I am still thinking about it. I like it a lot.
(... She has not actually read it herself, you understand)