Sea of Tranquility

First Edition, 255 pages

English language

Published April 5, 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN:
978-0-593-32144-7
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OCLC Number:
1251739463
Goodreads:
58446227

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Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in …

6 editions

Une madeleine de Proust d'un thème SF

Lu en anglais.

Le thème traité dans le livre est un classique dans le genre SF. Il y a eu de nombreux traitements, s'alimentant de l'imagination ou de la science et éventuelles conjectures.

Ici, c'est avant tout un prétexte, je pense, un prétexte pour déployer différentes questions sur la société, mais des questions de vie et perceptions individuelles. Sans écrire un roman en 20 tomes, l'autrice nous offre un roman agréable à lire et qui donne à penser.

Parfois, certains développement me donnaient envie de critiquer. La musique du récit m'emmenait à nouveau. On pourrait qualifier certains sujets d'éculés. S'ils sont maniés avec finesse ou légèretés, ils peuvent non moins être agréables.

Low-key time-travel scifi

Content warning Discussing core plot point

A quiet tale of time travel

Although the time anomaly and time travel in this book are of the standard variety the author manages to give the concept an uniqie and compelling spin. It's more about the characters that encounter the anomaly and are linked through it while they're unstuck and kind of isolated in their own time. I appreciated the inclusion of pandemics in the narrative but it's a little depressing that people don't seem to have learned from them even centuries in the future. There are some minor flaws but I liked the overall feel of the book.

Lovely

I found this touching and hopeful, I liked how poignantly the characters were drawn, and the themes of kindness and the vicissitudes of life.

My main complaint was that I think the simulation theory stuff was basically an unnecessary macguffin and didn't add to the themes (at least as far as they interested me).

Review of 'Sea of Tranquility' on 'Goodreads'

Really nice plot around time and family and friends relationships. The story evolves well and the last part and conclusion are just fantastic and pleasing. I'd love to see this on a movie, to be honest.

Enjoyable, even once you've guessed how it’ll all go down

I liked it because it was well written and short. Longer would have been boring, shorter would have cut too much. I wonder how the author's experience during the pandemic influenced the Last Book Tour Before the End of the World chapter (at least one discussion in the book was real—but from 2015). I liked this book very much, but I liked Station Eleven better, hence the 4 stars.

ah well

A pandemic novel, a time travel novel, and a central character who is a beleaguered author who can't decide if they are writing a novel or a novella... phew, honestly the writing was pretty good for me to give it 3 stars.

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Subjects

  • Fiction
  • Literary Fiction
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Travel
  • Simulation Hypothesis