No Star Burns Forever - Sea of Tranquility (2022) Part 2

The steady trickle of the river reminds you of home, but as you blink, you find yourself not on the abandoned streets of Night City, rather, the glittering white pillars and spires of Colony One surround you. There can be such oppression in order, can't there?

This week the cast analyses Emily St John Mandel's conclusion to a trilogy of novels to try and figure out what exactly is going on.

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

D.C. McNeill: I want to preface this discussion with, I've read a lot of critical pieces on the book since last week, and I've done a lot of thinking about where this book sits for me, having read it a couple of times, or I guess three or four times now, having

Thought a lot more about Mandel's work throughout the discussion with you guys. And where I think it has value is maybe different than what I was thinking when we went into this unit.

So yeah, I'm curious if you guys feel like this was a sufficient payoff for us having our little Mandel mini-unit divergence, and yeah, where you guys land.

I want to get a Pat first because I realized that you've had a couple of days to chew on it now. So yeah, what do you think about this whole thing and how it sits within the larger corpus of Mandel's trilogy as in?

Patrick: Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It is so different from the first two books.

It's a confronting thing thinking about, does a high concept ruin a thematic cohesion, i.e. does time travel distill this trilogy of stories that are deeply human and relatable and, you know, like, you know, rooted in reality and the human experience?

And then it's like, does time travel obscure that or, I don't know, like unfocus it or some way? I last night, I was I was literally in the shower and I had a thought and I was like, I need to write this down.

But I've actually I've wrote something down. I know.

And a literal shower of thought too.

D.C. McNeill: Now, folks, this is this is what this this job is all about, is going away and doing something else and then being like, oh, my God, I have to write that down and then writing it down and forgetting where you've written it down.

That's half of my experience with this job. Yeah, what do you got?

Patrick: And because I've written because I've written this down, it's much more poetic than I normally am.

So just, yeah.

Emily St John Mandel's trilogy ends by focusing the series' thematic lens in an unexpected way. She wonders what makes human interaction so special.

To get ontological, it's where drama is created, that clash of binaries that generates infinite nuance in between. It makes me think of that Niels Bohr quote, in the great drama of existence, we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

He's talking about quantum physics there, but equally it's a good expression for how human drama is an equal and opposite partner to time.

Time is documenting supernovas, yes, but it's also hosting the most intricate interplay of complex variables you'll see anywhere in space, i.e. human drama. You need time in order to have human drama.

She even choosing to jump on stage to help Arthur Leander. Miranda falling and dropping the both keys into the ocean. Morella choosing to ignore Vinson at that bar.

These are moments, both decisions and acts of random fate, that only take form in time, and which in turn changes the course of the universe. And only us humans really understand what that means.

Mandel then asks, but what if decisions and fate were reversible? Would drama still mean the same thing, produce the same feelings?

Would we put any less value on the past because of the sobering fact that the past is malleable and not, in fact, irreversible? And to that question, Mandel says, the time police are on their way.

D.C. McNeill: Round of applause to Patrick Lovern. Well done. Yeah, nihilism, right, is the thing that she puts square in her lens and doesn't spend any time discussing that.

The book just kind of ends. And there's some of the criticism I read. This is by Lily Zhao, and this is her article, provocatively titled, Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility is an Overly Simplistic Exploration of Nihilism.

I roundly disagree with her thesis and would have to do a lot of work to kind of recompose her argument to make it sort of feel like something I agree with. But this is what she, this is the bit that I think relates to what you were talking about.

Through these intersecting timelines, Mandel raises interesting conundrums about time travel and the value of human life. Zoe warns Gasperry not to attempt to save the lives of the people of the past, in fear that it will compromise the future.

She proclaims that the job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment. Additionally, multiple characters throughout the novel grapple with the possibility they are living in a simulation.

Gasperry refers to the anomaly as a corrupted file, and he ponders the possibility that the world as he knows it is not truly real. This worry is compounded by the fact that, in the book's futuristic timelines, very little of the characters' lives as they see them are truly real.

The humans who inhabit moon colonies live under an artificial sky that is meant to resemble that of Earth. To communicate across space, characters utilize holograms that give only the appearance of a face-to-face meeting.
On a more abstract level, the characters are unfounded in their worry. They are, after all, living in a simulation called a novel.

And, you know, I think that's the most salient and provocative part of Lily's piece there, because I think this is also a book that is using these ideas to think about what a novel is. It's a book about books, and it's a book about...

It's a book about Mandel's books, and it's a book about her reflecting on what it has meant to be an author that has done this thing of writing a bunch of books that have the same characters in them that are nominally not really sequels or prequels

to each other. I have so many big and complicated and unwieldy thoughts about what you said as well, which I'm sure we'll sort of really dig into as we talk through this book.