(Captain George Vancouver on the ship Discovery in 1793 later gets an earlier mention: I said be ready: it’s that kind of book.) The novel also happens in 2020, where it follows a woman named Vincent and a 21st century Ponzi scheme, and in 2203, where it traces Olive Llewellyn’s book tour through Manhattan, Toronto, the Republic of Texas, and elsewhere (she already knows her way around Colony One on the Moon).

In 1912 and over the following few years, to start, which is when it deals with the ‘double-sainted’ character named Edwin and touches on empire and the BC wilderness. In the novel, the Sea is the site where we’re told that ‘the first moon colony’ was built - near where ‘the Apollo-11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century.’ This isn’t 1969 anymore.īut when and where are we? Mandel’s narrative takes place at various times. But both these dates are peripheral (and ‘tranquility’ on a crash site is at the very least suspect). It was first named on a 1651 lunar map, for the ‘flat plain’ that was actually the consequence of a meteoric crash site, but perhaps is better known now as the site of the Moon landing in 1969, where Neil Armstrong left his flag and his footprints. Take the ‘Sea of Tranquility,’ for example. Or maybe it’s already started - you never can tell. As though the writer is saying: Try to be ready for it: the game’s about to begin. As readers, we’re being asked to play Time. Which is a conundrum.īut that’s the point. Or else to believe it but believe in alternatives as well, perhaps those that we haven’t even thought about yet. Those three buts are critical: they tell us not to believe what’s happened already and likely not anything that follows either.

Each of these statements appears so matter-of-fact that it would be easy to skip over the way each of the observations ends: but he locates greyness instead of difference, but exaggeration is at least a little true, but his ‘secretly radical views’ will speed up his fate.

We’re told he’s been sent ‘into exile,’ and also that he’s been formally educated at the ‘best schools,’ meaning British. Andrew stands ‘with gloved hands’ on the upper deck of a mid-Atlantic steamship, yearning for the unknown.

In the first paragraphs of Part 1 of Sea of Tranquility, dated 1912, a young man named Edwin St.

Emily st john mandel book