Despite this conceit wearing thin in parts, the prose never stutters. But while Sea of Tranquility both reflects our current crisis and revisits moments and characters from Mandel's preceding two books, it also demonstrates a creative leap for the author: It's the most explicitly science-fictional of her works, exploring time travel by way of a lunar colony in 2401. Unlike Station Eleven, this book could not have been written before our particular pandemic. Sea of Tranquility is a tale of retrospects, of foresights, of the same moment layered on top of itself like repeated musical notes and of quotes that echo across time. So it stands to reason that the book she wrote during the early stages of the pandemic would be so self-reflective. The release of the stellar TV adaptation in 2021 likely only increased Mandel's quasi-prophetic positioning within pop culture. This meta narrative comes as no surprise, as Mandel's meticulously researched 2014 pandemic novel Station Eleven came across as oddly prescient in the first year of Covid in 2020. And clearly history repeats itself in Sea of Tranquility, when a new pandemic in 2203 makes Olive's book the most unputdownable lockdown read.

It may well have been true, too, of the flu in 1918. It's a keen sentiment that in hindsight seems horribly accurate for the Covid-19 pandemic. John Mandel's latest work Sea of Tranquility revolves around - author Olive Llewellyn articulates the reluctance to name this world-changing event: 'This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us.' In Marienbad - the fictional future pandemic novel that Emily St.

Station eleven book