麻豆传媒

Emily St John Mandel

Picador

IT SAYS a lot about Emily St John Mandel鈥檚 imagination that while there are multiple instances of time travel in her new book, Sea of Tranquility, this is only one of several intriguing plot strands.

The novel, Mandel鈥檚 sixth, is a welcome return to science fiction after her contemporary outing, The Glass Hotel. Her highly successful fourth novel, Station Eleven, is set 20 years after a deadly pandemic, and although Mandel has said that she didn鈥檛 see that book as sci-fi, she now seems to be embracing the genre. Most of Sea of Tranquility is set centuries into the future, when people have colonised the moon and even the nearby star systems.

Stories that feature time travel usually have to wrestle with its potential paradoxes somehow. Even if a time traveller doesn鈥檛 murder their grandfather, thereby preventing their own birth, they have changed the past simply by being there, which could have knock-on effects on the present day. So, which version of reality is correct: the one where the time travel happened, or the one where it didn鈥檛? And does this mean time travel is impossible?

One of the neatest literary solutions I have seen so far comes from William Gibson in his novel , but whenever it happens, the universe branches off into a separate timeline, so there are now multiple versions of reality.

Mandel has a different, mind-bending approach, although it would be an awful spoiler to reveal too much. Suffice to say that in her universe, time travel isn鈥檛 all fun and games 鈥� in contrast to the expectations of her character Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, an apparently shiftless hotel security guard on the moon whose physicist sister Zoey lands him a job as a time anomaly investigator.

In this world, the moon-based Time Institute keeps time travel tightly regulated. People can only visit the past to carry out scientific investigations and must undergo years of rigorous training and research so they blend in.

This can make the experience traumatising. 鈥淵ou step into a party, and you know exactly how and when each and every person in that room is going to die,鈥� says Zoey, who works for the Time Institute. 鈥淵ou might be talking to a woman, let鈥檚 say she has young children. The one thing you absolutely cannot say to her is 鈥楧on鈥檛 go swimming next week鈥�.鈥�

Station Eleven, centred on a flu pandemic, enjoyed a surge of popularity thanks to covid-19. It has also been turned into an HBO Max TV series. In Sea of Tranquility, by the time we are living on the moon, there have been many pandemics, caused by coronaviruses, influenza and Ebola.

鈥淚n this world, people can only visit the past after years of rigorous training and research so they blend in鈥�

It is good to see that, in this universe at least, none of these outbreaks were civilisation-ending, but it is jarring to see the people of 2401 casually referring to 鈥淪ARS Twelve鈥�.

And when we zoom in on one woman鈥檚 experience of fleeing a particularly deadly pandemic in 2203, Mandel convincingly describes her gut-clenching terror.

Armed with unique foreknowledge of how bad things will get, the fleeing woman, Olive Llewellyn, upends her life to catch one of the last flights from an infested Earth. She frantically tries to convince a sceptical husband by phone to take what may be life-saving precautions, such as pulling their child out of school and accepting the need for stockpiling food. In light of covid-19, many readers will empathise with that rising tide of panic.

If I have one complaint about Sea of Tranquility, it is that some of Mandel鈥檚 fascinating ideas about time and physics are mentioned too briefly without being fully explained. The book is relatively short and it left me wanting more. I hope these are topics that the author will explore in her next work.