Northwest Akron's Speculative Fiction Group

"Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel

A welcoming place where readers share their love of speculative fiction through a lively conversation about a pre-read title. For May we are reading "Sea of Tranquility," by Emily St. John Mandel.

This is a group for speculative fiction fans (science fiction/fantasy) who would like to read and discuss genre literature.
Each month we'll have a discussion about a book, either a new release or an older book (but ideally something that most people haven't read yet), that we've read before meeting.

"Sea of Tranquility," by Emily St. John Mandel.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

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