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A review by rbruehlman
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
2.0
This was a stupid, unsatisfying book.
I'm trying to think of why this ranked so highly on the New York Times bestseller list and got warm reviews from critics. Am I missing something? My time felt wasted. I felt like I read a bunch of predictable words that said nothing and had no meaningful takeaway.
The only conclusions I can come to on this book's popularity is that it references a pandemic like Covid-19 in 2022, when the pandemic was still fresh, and it invokes time travel. Time travel is always a crowd pleaser. Hell, I like time travel. And who doesn't want to feel smart contemplating the question "Is life a simulation?" in a book club?
The problem is, none of it was original. It was bland and uninspired. A pandemic? Why, let's write up a pandemic that sounds exactly like 2020, except instead of Zoom, we'll have hologram meetings, and we'll be just as tired of talking on hologram meetings while cooped up in a house as we were on Zoom. And with the ambient ambulance soundtrack to boot! Isn't this supposed to be 200 years in the future? Why is everything basically identical except with some occasional futuristic-sounding stuff mixed in? I don't want to read about a repeat of 2020. I lived it. It sucked. Why is reading a lazy copy paste of a pandemic in any way interesting? It's not that I have an issue reading about pandemics inherently, but this was so lazy and pointless.
As for time travel, that explored nothing new either. People distort time when they go back in time, just by being there! This has been explored many times before. Is time circular and linear, in which case distortions made by time travel were always meant to be and always existed? Yep, that's been explored before too. While I didn't predict which character was Gaspery, I did predict it was a time loop long before the book got there. It was predictable.
It's not that the book needed to completely reinvent the concept of time travel and explore some completely new way of tinkering with it. The book just had to do something interesting with the established tropes it used, and it didn't. Gaspery goes back in time, immediately helps avert someone's death, that person lives, and ... hooray? Cool? Nothing really happens after that; the author lives and we get her unoriginal accounting of the 2020-but-not-2020 pandemic. It was very anticlimactic. I was expecting something deep here, but it was shallow as a puddle. Frankly, Zoey's story was more interesting than Gaspery's--I'd have taken a good starcrossed-lovers love story involving time travel. (Hell, I think Time And Again explores exactly this dilemma, and it was much better.)
This was a stupid book. I don't mean stupid lightly here. I'm not trying to be crass, truly. But it was stupid, because it was painfully predictable and there was no real meaningful point I could discern. I did not find it interesting to read with no food for thought.
I thought the sci-fi writing was really horrible as well. Normally sci-fi books that try to be in-the-somewhat-near-future run into problems with me because the inventions are outlandish and seem so fantastical that I can't easily suspend belief. e.g., in twenty years from now we are not going to have flying cars. This book had the opposite problem--life seemed exactly the same a hundred, two hundred years in the future as it did now! Oh, sure, there were holograms and space colonies, but somehow we haven't figured out self-driving cars and still use taxi drivers? Huh? We've figured out time travel, but have flickering holograms? We react to a pandemic in the exact same way as 2020? Why did the book need to invent its own pandemic in the future anyway? Why not just use 2020? It would have worked just as well--not that the book worked well to begin with, but a copycat futuristic pandemic simply wasn't necessary for whatever the book was trying to achieve.
This story would have been less forced had everything taken place in the twenty-first century and there were no space colonies. The space colonies added literally nothing to the book anyway. In fact, none of the sci-fi elements in this book contributed meaningfully in any way, to the plot or otherwise. They were just ... there, almost as if to be able to call the book "sci-fi" for some indiscernible literary cool factor or something. If you are going to write a sci-fi book in the future, then flesh it out properly and worldbuild it.
Lazy writing in every respect. It's not even enjoyable lazy writing.
I'm trying to think of why this ranked so highly on the New York Times bestseller list and got warm reviews from critics. Am I missing something? My time felt wasted. I felt like I read a bunch of predictable words that said nothing and had no meaningful takeaway.
The only conclusions I can come to on this book's popularity is that it references a pandemic like Covid-19 in 2022, when the pandemic was still fresh, and it invokes time travel. Time travel is always a crowd pleaser. Hell, I like time travel. And who doesn't want to feel smart contemplating the question "Is life a simulation?" in a book club?
The problem is, none of it was original. It was bland and uninspired. A pandemic? Why, let's write up a pandemic that sounds exactly like 2020, except instead of Zoom, we'll have hologram meetings, and we'll be just as tired of talking on hologram meetings while cooped up in a house as we were on Zoom. And with the ambient ambulance soundtrack to boot! Isn't this supposed to be 200 years in the future? Why is everything basically identical except with some occasional futuristic-sounding stuff mixed in? I don't want to read about a repeat of 2020. I lived it. It sucked. Why is reading a lazy copy paste of a pandemic in any way interesting? It's not that I have an issue reading about pandemics inherently, but this was so lazy and pointless.
As for time travel, that explored nothing new either. People distort time when they go back in time, just by being there! This has been explored many times before. Is time circular and linear, in which case distortions made by time travel were always meant to be and always existed? Yep, that's been explored before too. While I didn't predict which character was Gaspery, I did predict it was a time loop long before the book got there. It was predictable.
It's not that the book needed to completely reinvent the concept of time travel and explore some completely new way of tinkering with it. The book just had to do something interesting with the established tropes it used, and it didn't. Gaspery goes back in time, immediately helps avert someone's death, that person lives, and ... hooray? Cool? Nothing really happens after that; the author lives and we get her unoriginal accounting of the 2020-but-not-2020 pandemic. It was very anticlimactic. I was expecting something deep here, but it was shallow as a puddle. Frankly, Zoey's story was more interesting than Gaspery's--I'd have taken a good starcrossed-lovers love story involving time travel. (Hell, I think Time And Again explores exactly this dilemma, and it was much better.)
This was a stupid book. I don't mean stupid lightly here. I'm not trying to be crass, truly. But it was stupid, because it was painfully predictable and there was no real meaningful point I could discern. I did not find it interesting to read with no food for thought.
I thought the sci-fi writing was really horrible as well. Normally sci-fi books that try to be in-the-somewhat-near-future run into problems with me because the inventions are outlandish and seem so fantastical that I can't easily suspend belief. e.g., in twenty years from now we are not going to have flying cars. This book had the opposite problem--life seemed exactly the same a hundred, two hundred years in the future as it did now! Oh, sure, there were holograms and space colonies, but somehow we haven't figured out self-driving cars and still use taxi drivers? Huh? We've figured out time travel, but have flickering holograms? We react to a pandemic in the exact same way as 2020? Why did the book need to invent its own pandemic in the future anyway? Why not just use 2020? It would have worked just as well--not that the book worked well to begin with, but a copycat futuristic pandemic simply wasn't necessary for whatever the book was trying to achieve.
This story would have been less forced had everything taken place in the twenty-first century and there were no space colonies. The space colonies added literally nothing to the book anyway. In fact, none of the sci-fi elements in this book contributed meaningfully in any way, to the plot or otherwise. They were just ... there, almost as if to be able to call the book "sci-fi" for some indiscernible literary cool factor or something. If you are going to write a sci-fi book in the future, then flesh it out properly and worldbuild it.
Lazy writing in every respect. It's not even enjoyable lazy writing.