Kazen's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

I was interested in the first few chapters of this book, but once we can see what's happening I realized I'm not a fan of any of it.

The not-so-bad:

- The writing is serviceable. Not bad, not great, didn't highlight any sentences for their beauty... simply serviceable.

- There are two or three nuggets worth thinking about for a minute or two, but nothing deeper.

The not-so-good:

- I get the feeling that Mandel is trying to explore our current pandemic through a science fictional lens but the world-building is weak, the device holding the book together is loose and not satisfying, and the similar writing style across time periods makes everything feel same-y. Not to mention that a virus in 2200 creates the exact same conditions as in 2020, with a moon colony standing in for Earth and holograms instead of Zoom.

- While the main characters appear to be cishet (and also white, because race and ethnicity are ignored, which kinda means assumed white?) many side characters are queer. They talk about their same sex partners in passing, which is nice, but I'm afraid that queerness is being used to signal the future more than anything else. Queer folx deserve to be more than set dressing.

- The Olive character feels like a self-insert of epic proportions. She's an author who wrote a novel covering pandemics a few years before an actual one breaks out.

“So I’m guessing I’m not the first to ask you what it’s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic,” another journalist said.
“You might not be the very first.”

Mandel must have had tons of those conversations in 2020 re: Station Eleven. Then she goes on to the work we're holding in our hand:

“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”
“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.
“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”
“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her.

- To make things even more meta, someone at a book signing takes Olive for task because the book doesn't seem to have a point. Elsewhere, Olive disputes this:

“I was just trying to write an interesting book,” Olive said. “There’s no message.” “Are you sure?” the interviewer asked.

I would have to say she failed because not only is there no point, but the book isn't interesting. She gestures at larger themes (seeking but not finding, what "the end of the world" means) but doesn't explore them in any depth.

All in all this book fails for me. It fails to be beautiful on the sentence level, fails to be interesting in its SF elements, and fails to make me think about human nature in the way it is intending. I'm chalking it up as disappointing and moving on.