Almost all the characters weather them: Edwin St. Pandemics play an important role in “Sea of Tranquility,” as they did in earlier novels by Mandel. In both history and simulations, Mandel said, we’re living inside of a construct. For example, as she was writing “The Sea of Tranquility,” protests were breaking out across the United States that questioned long-held assumptions – such as, that all people are treated equally in American society. Mandel first discovered simulation theory while she was procrastinating on the internet, and she said she was struck by its similarity to the way we write history. In “The Sea of Tranquility,” a simulation hypothesis is offered as an explanation for future humans’ ability to time travel, a feat that is almost mind-blowing in its physical implications. Simulation hypotheses – like the one famously explored in “The Matrix” films – have become increasingly popular in recent years (both Elon Musk and Neil Degrasse Tyson have said the theory as plausible), and they are used by certain scientists and philosophers to explain things about our universe that appear inexplicable. Disorienting in nature, the anomaly acts as a sort of tunnel that allows characters across centuries to experience one another’s environments.Īt the core of the novel is the question of whether the multiverse Mandel has created is “real,” or if it is a computer simulation being run by some unknown overlord, human or otherwise.
Andrew, a 20th-century minor aristocrat who travels by rail across Canada Olive Llewellyn, a 23rd-century author who Mandel admits is based on herself and Gaspery-Jacques, a time traveler from a 25th-century colony on the moon, are bound together by a single anomaly that rips through the fabric of space and time, and punctures ordinary notions of reality. “So, I set it on the moon.”Īll of the characters, including Edwin St. “My immediate instinct was to set (the story) really far away,” she said. She was in lockdown in her apartment in New York with her husband and her daughter, and everywhere on Earth seemed too close. When Mandel sat down to write the novel, it was the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Spanning six centuries – from 1912 to 2401 – “The Sea of Tranquility” starts right before World War I and ends up at a human colony on the moon.
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