A Dad-Daughter Deep Dive into Sea of Tranquility

Lauren Shoemaker: Welcome to Plugged In: A Women-Centered Science Fiction Book Club podcast. I'm your host, Lauren Shoemaker. In this semi-regular podcast series, we'll explore sub-genres, tropes, history, and current trends of science fiction written by women. Today, my dad is on the podcast to talk about Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. Yay!

Mark Shoemaker: Women centered. Your dad's here. 

Lauren: Yay. That's okay. You could talk about science fiction written by women. 

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: In fact you read— 

Mark: I read this first. 

Lauren: Emily St. John. Yeah. Before me. 

Mark: I did. 

Lauren: Do you wanna introduce yourself for the listeners? Who are you, what are you up to?

Mark: I'm Mark Shoemaker. I'm Lauren's dad. 

Lauren: I was gonna say I'm, are you, wait, wait. My question is “what are you up to?” Because I edited it from “what do you do?” Well… 

Mark: I do as little as possible. I'm in the process of what's called terminal leave. I'm in, six weeks, six little over seven weeks, I guess, away from being retired from the United States Space Force.

Lauren: Yay. 

Mark: And then growing up to be an adult and figuring out what to do with my life after twenty-eight and a half years of being institutionalized in the military. 

Lauren: My next question is, are you a reader? 

Mark: I am a reader. 

Lauren: What? Elaborate, please. 

Mark: I read all sorts of different things. I read science fiction, I read some historical fiction. I read a lot of nonfiction. 

Lauren: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: All sorts of different types of things. When you look at, if you were, look at my Goodreads, there's no theme other than ecclectia. If that’s a word? 

Lauren: I don't know. 

Mark: Okay. 

Lauren: I feel like mine's pretty similar, but I feel like I typically stick with fiction. 

Mark: Yeah.

Lauren: So I'm gonna start by summarizing. 

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: This story, which is a big undertaking, given the nature of this story. 

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: So this one is a little hard to summarize because it’s a time travel novel, which also makes it a lot of fun. There are a ton of characters in this book and they all live in years ranging from 1912 to 2401, and beyond. The main character, who I think is the main character, he does most of the time travel. His name is Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, and he is under direction of the Time Institute, which investigating a supposed glitch in time that was experienced by Edwin St. Andrews in 1912; Vincent Smith in 1994; Olive Llewellyn, I think she experiences it in 2203, that one wasn’t super clear on when that happened; and Alan Sami in 2195. For Edwin and Vincent, they’re both located in Caiette, I hope I’m saying that correctly, which is located in British Columbia, and they see visuals of an airship terminal and hear a few violin notes. For Olive and Alan, they’re both in the Oklahoma City airship terminal, they see visuals of the British Columbia forest. 

During his time travel adventures, Gaspery breaks a few Time Institute rules and finds himself sent to jail in 2008. Eventually his sister time travels back to the twenty-first century from the 2400s to save him, create new documentation for him, and bring him to a rural farm near Oklahoma City in 2172. He undergoes facial reconstruction surgery, marries someone from his own time, the 2400s, and ends up regularly playing violin in the Oklahoma City airship terminal. He lives under the name Alan Sami. And, not to spoil the whole plot, but otherwise I don’t think we could talk about this book if we didn’t spoil the whole plot. So he is essentially the one who created the glitch. Alan Sami is Gaspery after the time, the facial reconstruction surgeon and all that. 

The glitch that was being investigated by the Time Institute in 2401 was actually formed by Gaspery’s, multiple presences in the same locations. That sentence, my auto correct kept trying to tell me was wrong. His 2400s version of himself and his 2195 version of himself are in the airship terminal at the same time, and when he was in British Columbia in 1912 and 1994, those are the other instances where he's in the same place. And he was the glitch the whole time. 

Okay. I apologize if that doesn't make sense to the listeners. Dad, what do you think? 

Mark: Well, what do I think of the whole thing? 

Lauren: No. Did I do a good job summarizing? 

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: Is there anything that I left out? 

Mark: We'll piece it together. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: I think you summarize the technical details of the plot. 

Lauren: Yes. Which I feel like— 

Mark: But the purpose of everything— 

Lauren: The purpose is different than the summary. 

Mark: The whole part about Vincent and Mirella. 

Lauren: Right. 

Mark: Like you didn't mention Mirella, a main character. 

Lauren: I don't think she's a main character. She's an integral character. 

Mark: The story is told from her first person in the first time she's introduced. Because she's talking about— 

Lauren: Oh, is it? 

Mark: Yeah. When she's talking about— 

Lauren: Oh yeah it is. 

Mark: About the Ponzi scheme and that whole thing. That whole section is her first person. You don't meet Vincent until much later.

Lauren: True. 

Mark: So I think Mirella is an underrated—

Lauren: Character. 

Mark: Underrated role in this. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: Because that's how, because Gasper went back to talk. I don't know if he went back to talk to her, or he just ran into her when he went back to talk to Vincent's brother. 

Lauren: I think he ran into her.

Mark: So that was serendipitous. 

Lauren: Yeah.

Mark: Anyway, there's a lot going. 

Lauren: There's a lot going on. It's not easy to explain and tie up in a neat little bow because, and I think this might be interesting to talk about right off the bat since we were talking about Mirella, because she appears in another story and so does Vincent. She's in Station 11. Did you remember that? 

Mark: No, I don't remember that. 

Lauren: How long ago did you read that? 

Mark: I read Station 11 during COVID-19. I read it in 2020. 

Lauren: That's horrible. On purpose? 

Mark: I read that and then there was like three… 

Lauren: Was it like, oh, all books that I have now, like The Dog Stars? 

Mark: Yeah. Read that in COVID too.

Lauren: I have that. 

Mark: Yeah. That was all accidental. 

Lauren: I think I have another one of your books that was a pandemic novel. I have not read those yet.

Mark: I've read Station 11 and The Dog Stars, and something else. And they all happened to be pandemic, during the pandemic. And they were written before COVID-19. 

Lauren: Yeah. Well, it's kind of like how, you know, the questions that Olive gets where she's like, well, what do you think about people that are reading pandemic novels? And it's all serendipitous, you're an example of it. You just happened upon it. And we'll go back to what I was talking about earlier, but when I first read this, I don't know that we ever really got to talk about it in depth at all when I read it because I was in college. But one thing that we talked about in my class that I read it for is how Olive is Emily. 

Mark: Olive is Emily. 

Lauren: Yeah. Olive is Emily.

Mark: It’s semi-autobiographic.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: Like the whole part about—

Lauren: Where she's like, the Marienbad is Station 11. 

Mark: Like, and then there's all the stereotypes of maternal things. 

Lauren: Yes. I remember bringing those up, asking her. 

Mark: I even made a note about that. 

Lauren: Mm-hmm. Me too. 

Mark: It's like where somebody asks her, “what do you do?” And she says, “I write books.” Olive says, “I write books.” “For children,” he asks, and there's just multiple gender stereotypes. Even 200 years into the future. 

Lauren: Yeah. Well also when I think this was a little earlier when she's talking to some woman, I think at some party or something. And she's like, “well, your husband is very kind to look after your daughter.” And she's like, “forgive me,I fear there's a problem with my translator bot. I thought you said he was kind to take care for his own child.” And then there's one that's not long after that where she was talking with, I think it was her taxi driver. And her taxi driver was like. Oh, it said something. I don't remember where, where it is. But also there's a lot of connection that's like Marienbad is Station 11. Because she's talking about the death of the prophet in Marienbad, and that's what happens in Station 11. So I have notes in here that I wrote in 2023 when I read this for the first time, and I highlighted, somebody asked, some audience member, in this book tour that Olive was on, asked her if she thought the death of the prophet was inconsequential and not climactic. And I wrote in here because I had read Station 11 mere days before I read this. And I wrote, “I also thought it seemed small and not climactic.” And I can't say the same now because it's obviously been a year and a half since I've read it. But I guess I thought it at one point, and I trust my intuition. But then she keeps going back to it. “The story kept moving without him.” “Isn't that reality? Won't most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways?” Which I think is also an allegory to how this book functions and how Gaspery ends his life or lives out the rest of his life, where he thinks it's not very climactic, but then of course he realizes at the end that he's the one who's causing the glitch. 

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: But yeah, he's just like living out on a farm in Oklahoma. One of the things that I, or one of the questions I kind of wanted to ask, is actually directly from the book. It's on page. 127, and it starts a chapter, and it says It's right after Gaspery finds out that Zoey works for the Time Institute. 

Mark: Okay. 

Lauren: And that she thinks they're in a simulation. And the question is, “if we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation?” And so I wanted to ask you the question, how do you think, what would tell you that we were living in a simulation? 

Mark: I don't know. I mean, the only thing, every time I think about that, I think of The Matrix. 

Lauren: That's what I wrote down in my notes. 

Mark: Like random—

Lauren: Like two cats would go past me. 

Mark: Well, but the glitch, right? So like— 

Lauren: I don't know, I fell asleep halfway through watching The Matrix. 

Mark: So in The Matrix when there's a glitch.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: And so there's clearly a glitch.

Lauren: Yes. 

Mark: And this— 

Lauren: But they also talk about how deja vu, like the two…

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: Like there's the example of like the cats going past like two cats. 

Mark: Right.

Lauren: Going past. 

Mark: But then, yeah, I think there was, I don't know if it was in that part, it was much later on, but it was almost like, does it matter?

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: There was a comment, right? Like does it matter? 

Lauren: It's on page 246 and it's “a life lived in a simulation is still a life.” 

Mark: Right. 

Lauren: Yeah. That was actually, when I read this book for class, that was one of the things. I was tasked to lead discussion on the last third of this book. And so that's what my questions that I wrote for it are from. But I talked, I asked a lot about that question. Like I said, it seems as though Gasper has accepted the fact that his life is likely lived in a simulation and that it might not be in whatever true reality there is in his universe.

Well, we know that the glitch is not an indication that he's in a simulation. I mean, it could still be, we don't really get closure on that. But do you think you would have the same reaction to knowing that you were potentially living a simulation? Do you think Gaspery’s reaction is one that might be common amongst people in this world if they were to someday find out? Or do you think the majority would disagree? That's what I asked the class. 

Mark: Yeah. That's an interesting question. Like, you know, it's a simulation, so then do your actions actually have, like is there a moral or ethical consequence to your actions? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: If it's part of the simulation, so, but if that's the case, then why did he, like I wrote a question like, why did he care so much about Olive?

Lauren: That's what I wanted to ask too. 

Mark: Like, why, so I wonder, if this is semi autobiographical, if we pull that thing. 

Lauren: Is there an author? 

Mark: Who is Gaspery in— 

Lauren: Oh, that saved her life. Oh. 

Mark: Is there somebody, like, is there a Gaspert in her real life? 

Lauren: That saved her life? Interesting. 

Mark: You know, and he was an interesting kind of ghost in the first half of the book, but then he becomes the center, like you've said, he's the main character. 

Lauren: Well because he has a huge chunk that's his own.

Mark: Yeah. The second half of the book. 

Lauren: Yeah, it's all him. 

Mark: It's almost like it's a second book. And once you know who he is, you realize he plays a much heavier role in the first half of the book, but you don't know that until you've read the second half. 

Lauren: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: I think reading this— 

Lauren: The second time. 

Mark: A second time was really interesting because there's so much foreshadowing that is latent. You don't even know that it's there in the beginning and then you go back and you read it again. You're like, “oh, I know what she's talking about here.” 

Lauren: I think I experienced that a lot after I read this for the first time, because I was then going deeper into it for class. So I was spending a lot of time flipping back and forth. But yeah, being a year and a half later, there were still some things that I forgot. 

Mark: Right. Well, I found another thing interesting, and, and it's on the same page where I made a note about the autobiographical Emily equals Olive thing at the top of 191. She's asking herself or she's, oh, she's in another audience speaking, doing a— 

Lauren: Is this a Zoom audience?

Mark: I don't recall. 

Lauren: Yeah, it's a holograph audience. 

Mark: Where she says why there's been this increased interest in post-apocalyptic fiction over the past decade. I'm like, well, yes. In our current time. So she wrote this, was published in 22, so if you go back. 

Lauren: Yeah, she was probably writing it— 

Mark: 2010 to 2020, essentially, there was a big increase in post apocalyptic literature. 

Lauren: You know how she makes a comment with her? Like, what are you working on now? And she's like, “oh, I'm working on the sci-fi thing. I don't know if it's a novel or a novella.” That's this. That's this. 

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: Because it is short. I mean like it's 250 pages plus, and I did kind of some nerdy diving into this when I wrote my paper about this book a couple years ago, because I compared it, the font size and the leading directly to Station 11. There's twice as many words on the page in Station 11. It's a very quick read. And being a publishing student and having that lens, I have a feeling that the a conversation that happened sometime in the publication of this book was, “hey, this thing is shorter. You have published quite a few full length novels in the past, and we wanna make it look substantial on the shelf next to Station 11, the Glass Hotel.” And my guess is that they had the book designer just make it X amount of pages. Or try to reach a certain page count with increasing the leading and the font size and choosing a different font. 

Mark: That's pretty nerdy. 

Lauren: It is pretty nerdy. Actually, two, three weeks ago I was at a book event and I was meeting this author and chatting with her as she was signing my books. I have three of her books. And one of them, she made a comment, she was like, “this is pretty hardy.” And it had a thicker card stock cover, the pages were thicker. And I was like, “yeah, actually, if you look, this one says it's published at, it was printed in Orlando, Florida.” And I have other books that I think are printed from the same printer because they have the same texture cover and pages. And she was like, “whoa, that's really cool.” And I was like, “yes, finally, someone understands me.” 

Mark: Yeah, I read this in two and a half days this time. I looked back and looked at Goodreads. I read it in three days last time. 

Lauren: I read it in two and a half days this time. Now I'll have to look at Goodreads and see how many days it took me the last time.

Mark: But I think, I made the note, when it skips the 2400. It's different, like the storytelling, I find the storytelling is different. The way that she tells the story. And, for me, this book was, and it was somewhere else. It was somewhere written here too. And I commented on it. This book just had a, made me feel, I had a, just a feeling like there's just a, like a fogginess as I read the book.

Lauren: Because you don't really know what's going on. One of my other things is a quote that I pulled. And I have it highlighted somewhere. I don't remember what page it's on. I could find it. But the quote is she's talking about like when she's in Texas and she gets the little burrs stuck to her shoes. she says, “when she pulled it apart or when she pulled one apart, she saw that it was real. No, real wasn't the word for it. Everything that can be touched is real.” And this is coming from somebody who was born on the moon, lives on the moon, and then has gone to Earth for a book tour. And it made me reflect a lot about what life would be like living on the moon. What do you think it would be like? Everything is fake. The weather is fake, the sky is fake. What kind of effects do you think that would have on people? There's already one mention in the story. 

Mark: I think it would be, there were some references to it with Olive and her husband and their daughter when they were in the pandemic. And they were going to all these, they weren't, it wasn't Zoom meetings. 

Lauren: It was a hologram.

Mark: Like how does, how does that make you feel when you're not living real life? Essentially when you've lost, I even made the note of it like there's a loss of, there's no human connection anymore.

Lauren: Yeah. Like that one lady who lives alone in her apartment and she was like, “I haven't seen another person in so long.” 

Mark: So I think that's what living on the moon with fake light and things like that would be like. It's still living. It's just a different kind. And there's that theme throughout this, in the pandemic pieces where she's talking about they’re just not, not engaging with people anymore. Doing the hologram speech tour. She's like, I could give this. And she's having a whole separate conversation in her head.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. 

Mark: While she's giving, giving presentations. You know, you lose the humanity of things. 

Lauren: Well, another thing, I don't know if you caught this, but Gaspery was talking about how he wears sunglasses living on, I think he moved to Moon Colony One, I think.

Mark: Yeah. 

Lauren: And he's like, “oh yeah, the Night City people who are sensitive to brightness because they only got sun every so often because the sun dome broke. 

Mark: Because the dome broke. 

Lauren: So they don't have the regular simulated days, which since I said simulated, going back to this, where they're like all freaking out about, “oh, are we living in a simulation.?” You are living in a simulation. 

Mark: Exactly in some ways. 

Lauren: What do you mean? You are living on a moon colony with a fake dome. You're living in, what's his name? Oh, what's that movie? I can't remember the name. Where he's like on TV, but he doesn't know he is on TV. 

Mark: Jim Carrey. 

Lauren: Yeah. It's the Jim Carrey movie.

Mark: Yeah, it's like that. 

Lauren: It's like that. What do you think you would miss the most about Earth if you had to go live on the moon?

Mark: Well, it depends on how real they make it, right? Like if there's real dirt and real trees growing and there's a real river flowing and there's rain happening. Does it matter how that happens? 

Lauren: Maybe. I think my answer would be oceans because you know that part–

Mark: What if there's an ocean? 

Lauren: But you know that part at the end, 

Mark: I think the ability to move freely, the dome. Like you see when you look at the periphery and you're there at the periphery on the moon.

Lauren: It's very dystopian. 

Mark: You're there and you can't go beyond this hedge. There was just all these little Easter eggs in here. But I think the, there was the whole section in the actual text from the book Marienbad. Where it was like, okay, this was, this was basically, this was my experience in COVID. You know, and the way that she described it, with this line, “a span of time, that was neither awful nor pleasant.” When I think back on my experience in COVID, there were pieces where— 

Lauren: They're really nice. 

Mark: It was really good. Like in the book, when she talks about the enchanted forest or whatever with her daughter, it makes me think of things that we got to do because we didn't have all the external distractions.

Lauren: Right. Because we were home. 

Mark: I don't want people to have to get sick for that. But there were the positives. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: And then you get this feeling. 

Lauren: Like your Rube Goldberg machine with Emma. 

Mark: Yes. Right. That opened up a beer bottle. I mean, I had to have a purpose.

Lauren: Had to. 

Mark: Well I had a question for you though. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Mark: So remember when Mirella’s out on the deck at that party? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: And that fortune teller comes up. And says, reads her poem. Do you think that was one of the travelers? 

Lauren: Oh wait, what does the fortune teller say? I don't remember. The fortune teller asks where she’s from. Wait, okay. I see this part. But who, because she just, she meaning Emily, just uses pronouns in this dialogue. So I don't know who's who, but someone is asking, it's either Mirella or the fortune teller is asking, where are you from? 

Mark: Yeah. What page are you on? 

Lauren: Sixty-one. “The fortune teller was older than Mar had thought at first. Somewhere in her thirties, first lines visible on her face. She was wearing a complicated arrangement of scarves. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.” I feel like that might be Mirella asking, but I don't know. Is that the fortune teller?

Mark: Well, she says, “you tell me yours. I'll tell you mine, and we'll see each other again.” That's not Mirella. That's the… 

Lauren: Right. 

Mark: Then says, “okay, but you go first.” And then the person says, “I hate people.” And Mirella says “all people?” 

Lauren: What if the fortune teller is Zoey? Or Aretta? Could be. 

Mark: Could be Zoey. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Mark: I was thinking it might be Zoey.

Lauren: The thing that makes me think that the person who's saying they're from Ohio is the fortune teller is because the comment that says, “oh, I thought maybe I heard an accent.” There's a lot of talk about accents in this, like when Gaspery is interviewing himself as Alan. And Alan is like, “I thought I heard an accent.” And we find out he does it on purpose, to mess with him. 

Mark: I think you could just back up the dialogue and assume it's every other. And Mirella was from Ohio. That's where she saw Gaspery.

Lauren: That's what I originally thought, but then you had me overthinking. 

Mark: But I'm wondering what's the purpose of this conversation? If not to introduce… 

Lauren: Time travel, maybe? 

Mark: Yeah, maybe because we know she hates Jonathan Alkaitis, but that never comes into the story again either. Anyway, I thought I found that to be, unless this is a time traveler… 

Lauren: Yeah. Like what are they there for? 

Mark: What's the point? I think it might be Zoey because on page 136, Zoey and Gaspery are talking and she says, 

“So Gaspery, picture this scene. You step into a party, at some long-ago point in time, and you know exactly how and when each and every person in that room is going to die. [...] And some of them are gonna die in [the most] preventable ways, [Gaspery]. You might be talking to a woman, let's say she has young children, and you know she's going to drown.”

Lauren: Because she knows how, well, who was there? 

Mark: That was Mirella. 

Lauren: Yeah, Mirella was there. 

Mark: And Vincent. 

Lauren: Vincent was there. 

Mark: Vincent drowns. 

Lauren: Yeah. Right. You know, Vincent drowns. 

Mark: I'm trying to figure out what's the purpose of that. There's gotta be a purpose for this. Or maybe it's just… 

Lauren: It's a leading line. 

Mark: But the whole story, there's a part where she talks about, the guy's like, “Hey, why'd you write this book?” It must be, what's the point of it? She's like, sometimes you just write a book to tell, to tell a story.

Lauren: To tell a story.

Mark: And I think this is like when I think like, what's the point of this book. 

Lauren: Of Sea of Tranquility. 

Mark: She just wanted to tell a story. There's no, like, the time travel is just a mechanism to— 

Lauren: To tell the story. 

Mark: Of the importance of human connection. And the idea that moments in time can have effects on each other. And so when you do something at one point in time, it can have an effect on the future, and then if you do something in the future, can have an effect on how you perceive the past. That's my takeaway. 

Lauren: Well, that's a nice little tie up. I think my takeaway is, especially based on the whole, like we're living in a simulation, life in a simulation is still life. I think, in the fact that Gaspery ends up living on a farm and enjoying farm life, albeit— 

Mark: Married Talia, by the way. 

Lauren: I know, yes. Okay. That's what I was saying in the summary. But I didn't wanna get into who Talia was. But since we're bringing her up, she's the girl who lived in Olive Llewellyn’s house.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. 

Lauren: On Moon Colony Two. Like that's crazy. 

Mark: Who Gaspery seemed to have kind of this connection with… 

Lauren: Like as a kid. 

Mark: As a kid, yeah. And then again as an adult when he went to work at the hotel.

Lauren: But my takeaway is, I think it's instead of looking for something that's like the bigger picture, maybe take a moment and look at the small details and appreciate life. Because sometimes we're moving too fast. Because he talks about “I moved too fast.” When he's saying, “I just walk through Oklahoma City. I just walked through the towers. Not in a hurry. Everyone else is in a hurry because I traveled too much and too far and I move too fast and now I just want to go slow.” I think that's a nice little two takeaways. That's a perfect little tie up, a little bow. 

 Thanks for listening to today's episode. It was so much fun getting to record this with my dad and to talk about a book that we both really enjoyed. We'll be taking a little bit longer between episodes from here on out, but next up will be an episode about Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, which is about a group of robots that open their own noodle shop.  This novella just came out earlier this month on August 5th, so I'm excited to see what is being cooked up in brand new science fiction. Subscribe on Spotify and follow along on Instagram at pluggedin.podcast. To access the transcript of this episode and all episodes, check out pluggedinpod.com.