Sea of Tranquility (2022) by Emily St. John Mandel

Book Review

Sea of Tranquility (2022)

by Emily St. John Mandel

    Welp, Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel is surely over the hump, heading towards a long career in the upper echelons of the Anglo-American world of literary fiction, based on the critical and audience success of the HBO Max version of her 2014 novel, Station Eleven.  I've managed to not finish the book version of Station Eleven, the Audiobook version of Station Eleven AND the television show, so I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan, but like always I'm interested in the intersection of literary fiction and science fiction themes, and therefore Sea of Tranquility, Mandel's new book, which is both a time travel caper novel AND a sequel to her well received 2020 novel The Glass Hotel (prestige TV version on the way!)

    In fact, I actually went out to my local Barnes & Nobel and bought the hardback, which I mildly regret because Sea of Tranquility clocks in at barely 200 pages (with large margins, blank pages between chapters, and chapters that are under fifty words each.)  I tried to savor the experience but there is no way I could have taken longer than two hours to read this bad boy.  The short length probably bodes well for the potential audience size- I picked my copy off a stack that was on the official Barnes & Noble book club table, and it makes sense.  Sea of Tranquility actually reminded me of a science fiction novella written by someone like Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov, but of course written by a contemporary author of literary fiction.    As you might expect there isn't much "hard" science fiction where the characters spend pages of exposition describing various impossibilities (like time travel) to the reader.

  I think St. John Mandel deserves credit for writing a time travel caper book when the obvious trend has been towards alternate histories and parallel universes, retro and brave at the same time, her choice, I would say. 

Drowning Practice (2022) by Mike Meginnis

 Book Review

Drowning Practice (2022)

by Mike Meginnis

  I've been really interested in the intersection of genre science fiction and literary fiction, particularly as it relates to the apocalypse/post-apocalyptic subgenre.  Much of the action in this space of the marketplace is with semi-succesful or already succesful writers of literary fiction adding science fiction themes in what I can only imagine is either an attempt to drive interest in the book or a legitimate reflection of growing interest in science fiction by writers of "serious fiction."  It's probably both.

  For me, the turning point was in 2017 when Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize after publishing two heavily genre influenced work in a row- Never Let Me Go (2005) was a straight forward science fiction/dystopia set up, and The Buried Giant was reworking of what might be called "Arthurian fantasy."  At that point, it would be hard for anyone working in publishing to claim that science fiction or fantasy couldn't be serious literature.   

  In Drowning Practice, every human on Earth has the same dream which features an authority figure telling them that the world is going to end on November 1st.   This simultaneity of an event taking place across all of humanity is enough to convince everyone of the truth of the message.   The protagonists are Lyd, a semi-succesful writer of literary fiction who suffers from clinical depression, Mott, her unbelievably precocious 10 year old daughter, and David, her psychotic CIA spy of an ex-husband.  I gather from the reviews that the reader is supposed to be charmed by 10 year old Mott, who, I shit, you not, decides that the one thing she wants to do before the world ends is write a novel.

  Only in the universe of contemporary American literary fiction would a book about the end of the world give you not one but two characters who spend most of the book musing about the meaning of literature in the wider world.   So while I was more or less annoyed the entire time I was listening to the Audiobook, I did finish it, which says that Drowning Practice isn't insufferably boring despite the characters being obsessed with the progress of a novel written by a ten year old.   Also it's yet another work of American literary fiction where one of the major characters is a sad, wealthy, well-educated white woman who has ambivalent feelings towards motherhood.  Truly, truly, truly a subject I would avoid if I could. 

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022) by Kim Fu

Book Review

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022)

by Kim Fu

  Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is another good example of the permeability of the membrane between science fiction and literary fiction.  While the description of each short story in this collection sounds like an average science fiction short-story: Bride meets sea-monster, woman moves into house invested with swarms of bugs, insomniac falls in love with a literal Sandman; the actual stories themselves seem closer to the territory of literary fiction, with the protagonists dwelling obsessively over their personal unhappiness or regrets over past relationships as common themes.  In other, words, basically, the same territory as non-science fiction short stories written by other authors in North America. 

  Fu is pronoun agnostic, but her website identifies her as agender, and her first book was about the experience of a transgender youth.  If gender was a subtext in any of these stories I missed it, in fact, I was a little dissapointed with the conventionality of the human relationships that Fu depicts in this book.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) by Becky Chambers

Book Review

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021)

by Becky Chambers

   Although A Psalm for the Well-Built (2021) is strictly a work of genre science-fiction,  it has a couple of characteristics that seemed interesting enough to warrant a listen to the Audiobook.  First, A Psalm for the Well-Built is an example of the newly coined "Solarpunk" genre of science fiction.  The term was coined in opposition to cyberpunk, which typically features dystopian, tech heavy scenarios.  Solarpunk, on the other hand, is set in futures where humans have solved/escaped today's contemporary problems through the use of innovative, non-earth destroying technology or risen from the ashes of the destruction of a society more like our own and learned the appropriate lessons about not destroying the planet.

   The question given such a scenario is how does a writer generate the kind of conflict necessary to engage a reader, surely the reason that dystopian futures have proved so pervasive in science fiction is that the necessary conflict exists before the writer even pens a word.  The other interesting characteristic is that this is the first book I can remember reading where the third person omniscient narrator uses the singular they to refer to a protagonist who does not possess a named gender.  The stroy of A Psalm for the Well Built has nothing to do with gender: It's about the relationship that develops between a human "tea monk" and a "wild built" robot, robots have escaped human enslavement in the distant past within this particular future universe.

   As for conflict, there isn't much- but perhaps that is because this is only the first chapter in a proposed series of titles about this world.