Sea of Tranquility is a speculative fiction novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel. It was published in 2022 and incorporates several characters from The Glass Hotel, one of Mandel’s earlier works.

The book centers on a twenty-fifth-century man named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. Throughout the text, he travels back and forth in time to speak to people who have experienced a mysterious anomaly in which different eras seem to “touch” each other, with multiple timelines collapsing into one single moment in the Oklahoma City airship terminal. The story is nonlinear and shifts back and forth in character perspective as Gaspery moves throughout the narrative.

Written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book foregrounds pandemics throughout several of the storylines. COVID-19 is referenced in a scene from early 2020, and one character ultimately dies from the 1918 flu pandemic, but the most notable example of this is the Olive Llewellyn arc. Olive is a novelist who has written a wildly popular book about a fictional pandemic, which mirrors Emily St. John Mandel’s own real-life career trajectory: her 2014 novel Station Eleven centers on a fictional disease called the “Georgia Flu” that obliterates most of the human population, ultimately leading to a post-apocalyptic environment in which the survivors essentially have to rebuild society from scratch.

As Olive tours Earth for Marienbad, her book, a newly emergent pandemic dominates the public discourse, and she must contend with being a “pandemic author” while a pandemic is actively occurring. Because of this, she can be interpreted as a direct stand-in for Mandel herself. Olive’s book soars in popularity as the pandemic rages, and she is tasked by the public with answering for pandemic narratives in relation to the human psyche. Some of the questions Olive receives about Marienbad can be directly transposed onto the plot of Station Eleven, and some plotlines seem to directly correlate between the two. Both involve a Shakespeare element, for example, and a prophet is assassinated in both.

In one of Olive’s chapters, Olive speculates on the retroactive nature through which pandemics arise. Rather than becoming evident all at once, the character notes, they really arrive in retrospect—by the time the event itself is clear, the consequences are already irrevocably in motion. In part 1, Edwin St. Andrew contends with a similar retrograde fatalism: reflecting on the fight with his parents that ultimately led to his exile, he muses: “Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”

This theme of consequence and causality is explored throughout the narrative, most evidently in Gaspary’s own storyline as he travels through time. He trains for years to be better prepared to preserve existing causality while time traveling and then leverages causality to help Olive evade the pandemic she is supposed to die from. For this, he experiences dire consequences of his own: he is framed for murder and trapped in time via a fifty-year prison sentence.

By titling the book Sea of Tranquility , Mandel draws together multiple narrative threads. Several characters live in the Colonies, a series of settlements on the moon based around Mare Tranquilitatis, the first location on the moon to ever be visited by humans. Many of the characters contemplate the idea of peace and tranquility at various points throughout the narrative—Edwin, content to simply linger in Halifax, then again in Caiette, embodies a peaceful stasis free of restlessness or listlessness. Rather than needing or wanting something specific, he is content to simply wait for whatever arises next to happen in its own time. Olive, in pandemic...