No Good Chickens - Sea of Tranquility (2022) Part 1

Caiette sleeps beyond the treeline. Here in the forest you are truly alone. Your loafers perch on the lip where the sand meets the sucking mud. Here, so far from the world, there may as well not be a world at all. The horizon and the trees are the only real thing.

This week the team try to peel back the layers of Emily St John Mandel's perplexing time travel novel Sea of Tranquility.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Patrick: So suddenly a lot of things made sense about you foregrounding supernatural more sci-fi stuff in the last two works. I was really sure that there was going to be nothing like this.

I thought yet again, it was going to be the possible feelings of what might happen in the future were always going to be fantastical and sci-fi-ish. I never thought we'd actually get to the point where it would go straight into sci-fi.

But yeah, it's interesting. It's as if you just read, it's as if the author just translated what they had been doing, which is completely grounded non-sci-fi thing into sci-fi all of a sudden.

It just has all the same structures and hallmarks and themes and stuff. And you know, the feelings of human experience in that book.

But you know, it's also quite interesting how like, she has to speculate a lot about what the future is going to be and how people will live in experience in settings in the future and how they possibly are similar to the feelings we have today.

But yeah, it's a bold swing to take, especially the time jumps she does. Yeah, and I really admire it. I think it's kind of...

So far, I like the previous one better, but I feel like this one is about to go into some crazy, insane, interesting direction.

And I'm here for it.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, this is a real... You built your career off writing these really meditative, literary fiction type stories, and then you wake up on a Thursday and you're like, fuck it.

What if it was all actually part of a big sci-fi trapping? And there's some... You know, it's...

I read The Singer's Gone last week, and then I read The Lola Quartet this week, two of Mandel's other works, and they're just literary fiction. Like this is a complete... This is a real post, Station Eleven.

You know, Mandel has escaped containment from Canada, is getting published everywhere. And the audacity to be like, yeah, my third big book. This is pretty incredible, I think.

Whether you like it or not, I think like, yeah, as you say, it's a swing, and a lot of authors will go their entire careers without swings that look like this. So, yeah, it's interesting.

So, I'll explain why we stopped where we stopped toward the end, but yeah, it shit's about to happen is what I would say. Darth, what about you?

Because this, I think is, I can't tell, I think that at this point, the stopping point, I'm making a prediction. This stopping point is Darth's worst nightmare of the book.

I think when you finish the book, you're gonna think it's like the best thing ever. But I'm curious where I find you right now, sort of, at the two-thirds mark.

Darth: Okay, so Station Eleven had me thinking it was sci-fi, and then rug pulling, so it wasn't. Glass Hotel had me thinking it wasn't sci-fi, and then rug pulling me so that it might be, but it might not be, we couldn't really tell.

So, I have not let myself assign any meaning to anything in this book until we finish it.

So, in my mind, there is no time travel yet, it could be a dream, it could be real, we don't know what's happening, and I will not dedicate my mind to anything until we get to the end, because I don't trust Mandel.