A review by cubaitlubin
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

adventurous mysterious reflective

Unexpected in a lot of ways - more literary, historical, and tender than anticipated. I realize I didn't know as much about it going in as I thought! Lots of Caitlin sci-fi checklist items here. Recommend reading while listening to a good synthwave playlist.

If we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation? I took the trolley home from the university at three in the morning. In the warm light of the moving car, I closed my eyes and marveled at the detail. The gentle vibration of the trolley on its cushion of air. The sounds-the barely per- ceptible whisper of movement, the soft conversations here and there in the car, the tinny notes of a game escaping from a device somewhere. We are living in a simulation, I told myself, testing the idea, but it still seemed improbable to me, because I could smell the bouquet of yellow roses that the woman sitting beside me held carefully in both hands. We are living in a simulation, but I'm hungry and am I supposed to believe that that's a simula- tion too?

This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watch- ing the airships rise up like fireflies on the horizon over Okla- homa City, this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we're living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.