Sea of Tranquility
⏳Introduction:
Sea of Tranquility is sci-fi that reads like non-fiction. Some of the themes contained within it are love, friendship, book tours, pandemics, the simulation argument, entropy, and temporal paradox. The book is not character-driven, but I like the plot and how people from different centuries are connected through an anomaly and through pandemics.
📶 Connections:
Edwin in 1912, is exiled from his parent’s house and is traveling aimlessly when he ends up in a small village close to Vancouver Island. He is walking in a forest when he experiences a disruption in his sense of the world, he gets transported to a strange place, he can hear someone playing music and he hears a “woosh” sound behind. Edwin goes on to believe that he hallucinated about that incident.
Mirella and Vincent are childhood friends that do not talk to each other anymore. Vincent’s brother is a pop artist and she used to be his photographer. One day, as she was filming a music video with him in a small village in Vancouver (the same one Edwin found himself in) in the late 20th century, she experienced the same thing as Edwin did. Someone playing violin in something that looked like an airport.
Olive lives on one of the colonies on the moon and she comes down to Earth for a book tour in the year 2203. One day, at an airship terminal, she hears someone playing violin and is transported to a forest. She can clearly see trees and greenery superimposed on the scenes of the airship terminal, a lot like augmented reality.
🥷🏼Themes:
🦠 Pandemics:
In each timeline, there is a pandemic. In Edwin’s timeline, there had recently been a smallpox pandemic in Alaska. In Mirella and Vincent’s timeline (2019) Covid-19 is just around the corner. In 2203, during Olive’s book tour, another one breaks out in Australia and New Zealand.
Every time dealing with a pandemic, humans make the same mistakes as before. Then they look back and in hindsight think that they should have seen it coming. It’s the science that saves us from catastrophes because it is so advanced that we can come up with vaccines quicker than the last time. Some things never change.
✊🏼 Change (nature vs nurture):
The theme of change is apparent in the story. Colonies on the moon and even on Europa and Titan deal with the same problems as humans on Earth did for so long. There are economic struggles and people are divided into classes. The main characters across centuries deal with the same issues.
Technology, however, has evolved exponentially over the centuries. We make significant progress in the fields of virtual reality, augmented reality, and space travel. We also discover time travel in roughly 400 years. Our evolution is based on biology and nature, but the evolution of technology is not bound by biology. That is one of the reasons why it evolves so fast.
💻 Are we living in a simulation?
Time travel is invented sometime before the 25th century, and it is made illegal for everyone except for some important folks in the government; The time institute. These specialized people go back to fix major crimes and/or anomalies.
One characteristic of this universe is that any mark left by a time traveler is fixed some years later. Things just happen in such a way that it looks like the time traveler was never there. Any disruption caused by going back in time disappears. Although this is by no means evidence that the universe is a simulation, it leads many people in the time institute to believe in this theory.
In my opinion, whether we live in a simulation or not doesn’t change anything. A life lived in a simulation is still a life. It does not really affect us either way, we will continue to feel love, heartbreak, sadness, happiness, anger, and other emotions. We will continue to make decisions and we would still be responsible for ourselves.
