Your principle or your job? Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel

 If you think you recognize the author's name, you probably do.  She is most famous for Station Eleven, although in my opinion, as good as that book was, The Glass Hotel was even better.  I have been consistently impressed with her work.  Her latest novella, Sea of Tranquility, was written and obviously influenced by COVID, and lockdowns.  This one is good, although not up to the bar Mandel had set for herself with her previous two books.  That would be an extraordinarily difficult standard to maintain, in all fairness.  If I am being blunt, the novella leans towards the self-indulgent and solipsistic, neither of which appeal to me.  There are some interesting ideas about moral duty and a few neat variations on time travel, making it worth consideration, and I will still recommend it, even if I will not categorize this one as required reading.  If you have not read The Glass Hotel, much of Sea of Tranquility will not make sense, and if you have, you may read this one with some disappointment, but Mandel is still among the better writers in the genre.

A few centuries hence, at a physics institute on the moon... somewhere... they figure out time travel.  It is a closely managed security concern, for obvious reasons.  When researchers detect anything anomalous in the historical record, investigators are sent back in time to determine whether or not someone is messing with the time line, and to do something about any offenders.  Enter Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, whose sister is a physicist at the Time Institute.  He finagles himself a position as an investigator after a life of meaningless jobs, after finding a particular interest in the question of whether or not some of the anomalies indicate that life, the universe and everything are just a computer simulation (solipsism alert! solipsism alert!).

In 1912, a British ex-pat hanging around Vancouver Island has a weird experience.  He writes about it.  A hundred years later, Vincent Smith (from The Glass Hotel, but presumably from another time line, or something, because in this time line, Alkatis really does get out of the country, and live out the rest of his life in Dubai) records a weird experience at the same location.  That shows up in a video project from one of her brother's AV compositions, years later.  Centuries later, something happens in the Oklahoma City airship terminal.  What's going on with these anomalies?

Gaspery gets his interest piqued by the notion that the best explanation is that everything is really a computer simulation, which is why time travel works anyway.  I mean, time travel?!  That's why he is so committed to becoming an investigator.  So, he starts going back to each of these points to try to piece together the puzzle.

Gaspery, himself, is the "cause," such as he is, of the anomalies.  By being in these places, and in particular, by being the violinist at the Oklahoma City airship terminal as an old man and then meeting himself there, everything goes screwy.  But, the interesting thing for him has to do with his interaction with an author, Olive Llewellyn, and typing Welsh names is obnoxious.  You're probably offended without knowing why.  You just think you're supposed to be offended.

Anyway, this is where Mandel gets utterly self-indulgent.  She wrote the book under COVID lockdowns, to the degree that they were lockdowns.  Recall that Station Eleven was actually released in 2014, but made Mandel famous in 2020 because of COVID.  So, she spent even more time thinking about pandemics, and navel-gazing.  Olive wrote a novel about a pandemic, got famous, wrote more books, including a much more abstract science fiction book (i.e. Sea of Tranquility), and then, Olive winds up amid a pandemic, and basically, this is self-indulgent, self-referential dear-diary stuff rather than anything necessary for public consumption.  We get it, Emily.  You are Olive.  Yes, yes, thank you.  Moving on.

Anyway, Olive is supposed to die in a pandemic, while on the lecture circuit for her novel set during a pandemic, but Gaspery (named for a character in the book, which his mother loved) has moral qualms.

He is told, in no uncertain terms, not to intervene.  Make no alterations to the timeline.  His job is to investigate.  The job of their agency is to preserve the timeline, and his primary concern is to make inquiries regarding the nature of the anomalies which may or may not indicate that we are all living in a simulation.

Besides, one of the observations made to him before he starts going back in time is that time tends to course correct anyway.

Yet he knows that a few days after he meets her, she will die of the brewing pandemic.  Does he let her die, or at least try to save her?

He tries.  He succeeds.  Olive lives.  For a time, anyway.  We all die, after all.  Memento mori.

Yet Gaspery made the choice to try to keep Olive alive for as long as he could, even though from his perspective, she was long dead, because once he was there, she was alive, in front of him.

I griped earlier that Mandel played around with solipsism by turning the plot on the question of whether or not the time anomalies indicate that everything is just a computer simulation, but in a way, Mandel salvages that point, in the following way.  Gaspery violates the cardinal rule of the Time Institute, which they manage as follows.  They dump you in the past, and frame you for an unsolved crime.  Let them pay the cost of imprisoning you.  Then, his sister comes back to bust him out and find him an isolated farm outside Oklahoma City while she skips town/celestial body.

That's how he wound up playing violin at the Oklahoma City airship terminal.  Along the way, he contemplates the simulation notion (I won't call it a hypothesis) and realizes the correct answer.

Who the absolute fuck cares?!

Solipsism is the most useless thought ever.

What matters?  How you live.  How Gaspery lived was that he tried.  He tried to save Olive.

Was that right?  In the context of time and the nature of the timeline, you can ask yourself that question, but a living person was in front of him.  He tried to save her.  Is the complex answer more right than the simple answer?  Sometimes.  In this time?  Make that call for yourself, but he was not obviously wrong.  He at least had virtuous motive.

Gaspery had a job.  He trashed his job, which he thought he could do, because when the time came (so to speak), he was faced with a choice.  The job, or the principle.  Do you try?  It may be futile.  It may amount to nothing.  But there was an innocent life.  Dead?  We're all dead, ultimately.  Do you try?

Hat Fitz & Cara, "Try," from After the Rain.