Sea of Tranquility

Citation

Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. Harper Perennial, 2022. 9781443466127.

Abstract

“In this captivating tale of imagination and ambition, a seemingly disparate array of people come into contact with a time traveller who must resist the pull to change the past and the future. The cast includes a British exile on the west coast of Canada in the early 1900s; the author of a bestselling novel about a fictional pandemic who embarks on a galaxy-spanning book tour during the outbreak of an actual pandemic; a resident of a moon colony almost 300 years in the future; and a lonely girl who films an old-growth forest and experiences a disruption in the recording. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, Emily St. John Mandel’s dazzling story follows these engrossing characters across space and time as their lives ultimately intersect. Sea of Tranquility is a breathtaking and wondrous examination of the ties that bind us together, by a master storyteller.”

Annotations

Remittance / 1912

“Edwin St. John St. Andrew, eighteen years old, hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic by steamship” (3)

Commentator’s Note: Sainted like Mandel, rather than poet-ed like Vincent in The Glass Hotel

“He’s on his way to a different world” (3)

Commentator’s Note: Another astronaut

“Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia” (5)

“a remittance man” (6)

Commentator’s Note: Paid to stay away from home

“A life of solitude could be a very pleasant thing” (7)

“He spends quiet hours sketching flowers and vases, learning the fundamentals of shading and proportion” (7)

“The forests and lakes and small towns subside into plains. The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed” (8-9)

“Can a house be haunted by failure?” (9)

“the horrifically featureless horizon” (9)

“‘You reap,’ Edwin says to himself
…
‘You reap what?’
…
‘Well, that’s just it, isn’t it,’ Edwin says” (10)

“the unfathomable wilderness, dark towering trees crowding in around the periphery. There’s something ludicrous about the idea that the wilderness belongs to Britain” (12)

“‘Does anyone want us anywhere?” he heard himself ask. ‘Why do we assume these farflung places are ours?’” (15)

“He was going to go forth into an incomprehensible world” (17)

“Victoria … It’s a far-distant simulation of England, a watercolour superimposed unconvincingly on the landscape” (19)

“‘I’ve been thinking about going north.’
…
‘Not very far. Just up Vancouver Island a little.’
…
‘But in the abstract, wilderness. Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?’” (21)

“What if one wanted to disappear into wilderness instead?” (21)

Commentator’s Note: Echoes of The Glass Hotel

“He doesn’t understand them and therefore finds them menacing” (22)

“What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water” (22)

“‘the entirety of this land is here for the taking … We can create our own world in this place’” (22)

“He has the same queasy sense of overexposure that he felt on the prairies” (23)

“Caiette … This place is precarious, that’s the only word for it. It’s the lightest sketch of civilizations, caught between the forest and the sea” (23)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. The Glass Hotel

“he isn’t unhappy. He just desires no further movement, for the time being” (23)

“Some of them know how to play chess, which is one of Edwin’s great pleasures. He’s never been very good at chess, but he enjoys the sense of order in the game” (24)

“Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair-this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him” (26)

“The gates of the forest. The phrase comes immediately to mind” (27)

Commentator’s Note: Always these minds in language. Compare “survival is insufficient” in Station Eleven, “sweep me up,” “why don’t you swallow broken glass,” “not star burns forever” in The Glass Hotel

“It’s like stepping into a cathedral … a maple tree just ahead, large enough that it’s created its own clearing” (27)

“a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound” (29)

“‘Would it help to unburden yourself?’” (32)

“‘I’m here to serve everyone who walks through those doors’” (32)

Commentator’s Note: Or through the gates?

“There’s a wrongness about the man that Edwin can’t entirely pinpoint.
‘If I may ask, Father, where are you from?’
‘Far away,’ the priest says. ‘Very far away’” (33)

2 / Mirella and Vincent / 2020

“‘My sister used to record videos. This next one is a video of hers that I found in storage, after her death, and it’s got some kind of glitch in it that I can’t explain’” (39)

“Mirella … Deep breaths, a fortifying layer of makeup. ‘Steady,’ she said aloud, to her face in the mirror. ‘Steady’” (40)

“‘It’s 2019,’ Louisa said. ‘No one’s invisible.’ But Vincent was” (44)

“Dredging up the brother’s name required a deep dive into memory, which was a place Mirella generally tried to avoid” (45)

“‘Hope you’re not offended,’ the man in the fedora said, ‘I don’t think your hands are dirty or anything, I’ve just gotten really into Purell since this thing in Wuhan hit the news.’ He was rubbing his hands together, with an apologetic smile. ‘Fomites aren’t a major mode of transmission with Covid-19,’ Gaspery said. Fomites? Covid19?” (46)

Commentator’s Note: Real pandemic vs. Georgia Flu in Station Eleven

“‘You’re from British Columbia, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah. Tiny little place called Caiette, northern Vancouver Island.’
‘Oh, near Prince Edward Island,’ the fedora said confidently” (48)

Commentator’s Note: Ha, always these little jokes in Mandel’s books

“‘psychedelics … Once you get into heroic doses, you start to have certain realizations about the world. So much is an illusion, right?’” (49)

“‘She drowned,’ she said.
‘Yeah. I mean, it seems like it. They were hundreds of miles from land. She disappeared in bad weather.’
‘Drowning was the thing she was most scared of’” (51)

“Gaspery … ‘I’m interested in, well, in a certain kind of anomaly, like that moment in the video when the screen goes black. I waited outside the stage door to ask him about it’” (53)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 91

“The things we see when we’re young” (53)

“Ohio” (55)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 193

“The man with the gun had a sleepy, sedated look about him” (56)

“‘Mirella,’ he said … How could he have known her name?” (57)

“Louisa had a kind of unspoiled quality, an air of having been cushioned from life’s sharper edges, which was less appealing now than it had been” (58)

Commentator’s Note: Like the Prophet’s mom in Station Eleven

“there were dangerous places here and there, places where she could get sucked into memories of another life, and this terrace was among them” (59)

“a woman came over to ask for a light and offered to tell Mirella’s fortune in return” (61)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Clarissa in The Glass Hotel

3 / Last Book Tour on Earth / 2203

“now as a matter of policy Olive didn’t reveal anything even remotely personal to anyone ever” (68)

“She’d lived all her life in the hundred and fifty square kilometres of the second moon colony, the imaginatively named Colony Two. She found it beautiful” (68)

“but there’s something to be said for unplanned cities. Colony Two was soothing in its symmetry and its order. Sometimes order can be relentless” (68)

“They were passing through an agricultural zone, enormous robots moving slowly over the fields. The sunlight here was sharper than at home” (69)

“‘Must be hard to be away from Sylvie and Dion, though.’
…
‘The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it’” (69)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. “Hell is…” Station Eleven

“If the distance is unbearable, she didn’t ask, then or in the two days she stayed with her parents, then why do you live so far from me?” (70)

“There’s something to be said for looking up at a clear blue sky and knowing that it isn’t a dome” (70)

“when she looked down her socks were spiked with little burrs … They were so perfectly hard and shiny that they could’ve passed for biotech, but 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. What she saw was it was a thing that grew, a castoff from some mysterious plant they didn’t have in the moon colonies” (71)

“‘I was so confused by your book,’ a woman in Dallas said. ‘There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t, ultimately. The book just ended. I was like’—” (71)

Commentator’s Note: Ha, sounds like some real feedback on Station Eleven

“‘I was just, like, what,’ the woman said. ‘My question is just…’” (72)

“Olive had dreams about playing chess with her mother” (72)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Edwin p. 24

“Did the book end too abruptly?” (72)

“‘Think of that quote I’ve got pinned up in my office.’
‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’ Olive said” (72)

Commentator’s Note: Another echoing phrase

“the new project … A centre for the study of physics” (72)

“I’m not sure it’s exactly a university” (73)

“‘I’m travelling because of a novel called Marienbad. It’s about a pandemic.’
‘That’s your most recent?’
‘No, I’ve written two others since then. But Marienbad’s being made into a film, so I’m on tour for a new edition’” (74)

“The driver was talking about the possibilities of the multiverse” (75)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. August in Station Eleven, Alkaitis in Glass Hotel

“‘I mean, for all we know,’ the driver was saying, ‘there’s a universe where your book is real, I mean nonfictional!’” (75)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Same idea in Glass Hotel

“‘So your book,’ the driver said, ‘it’s about a pandemic?’
‘Yes. A scientifically implausible flu’” (75)

Commentator’s Note: Versus covid19 in this one

“‘Have you been following the news about this new thing,’ the driver said, ‘this new virus in Australia?’
‘Kind of,’ Olive said, with her eyes closed. ‘It seems like it’s been fairly well contained’” (76)

“Twelve hours later, Olive was delivering her Marienbad lecture, which leaned heavily on her research into the history of pandemics” (76)

“She kept thinking about the conversation with the driver, because she remembered saying It seems like it’s been fairly well contained, but here’s an epidemiological question: If you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?” (76)

“Captain George Vancouver … When they ventured ashore, they found villages that could have housed hundreds, but those villages were abandoned. When they ventured farther, they realized that the forest was a graveyard” (77)

“A virus is either contained or it isn’t. It’s a binary condition” (77)

“She got out of bed that night and walked into a side table, because she’d been thinking about the layout of the previous night’s hotel room” (78)

“the Antonine Plague … the Romans wondered if they’d brought this calamity upon themselves, by their actions in the city of Seleucia” (80)

“‘Are you worried about the new virus?’ Olive asked the library director in Cincinnati
…
‘I’m trying not to be,’ the director said. ‘I’m hoping it’ll just fizzle out.’
‘I suppose they usually do,’ Olive said. Was this true? She was unsure as she spoke” (82)

“‘Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,’ she said.
‘Oh, please do,’ Olive said. ‘It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.’
‘So we don’t own the building,’ the director said, ‘but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.’
‘You’re right. That’s magnificent.’
‘Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.’ She leaned forward, paused for effect. ‘The lease is renewable’” (82-83)

“‘Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it’” (83)

“‘What’s it like writing such a successful book? What’s it like being Olive Llewellyn?’
‘Oh. It’s surreal, actually. I wrote three books that no one noticed, no distribution beyond the moon colonies, and then it’s like slipping into a parallel universe,’ Olive said.’ When I published Marienbad, I somehow fell into a bizarre upside-down world where people actually read my work. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never get used to it’” (84-85)

Commentator’s Note: Autobiographical, a counterlife

“Research teams had been working on time travel for decades, both on Earth and in the colonies. In that context, a university for the study of physics with an underground passageway to the police headquarters and countless literal back doors into government made perfect sense. What is time travel if not a security problem?” (86)

Commentator’s Note: This is uncharacteristically clunky exposition for Mandel

“‘When you met your husband, what was your first clue that you loved him?’
‘Well,’ Olive said, ‘I guess just a sense of recognition, if that makes sense. I remember the first time I saw him, I looked at him and I knew he’d be important in my life. Is that a clue, though?’” (87)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Vincent “recognizing” Bell in Glass Hotel

“talking about the end of the world while trying not to imagine the world ending with her daughter in it” (88)

“‘What message would you like your readers to take away from Marienbad?” another interviewer asked.’
…
‘I was just trying to write an interesting book,’ Olive said. ‘There’s no message’” (89)

“Someone, not Olive, had already written in this woman’s copy of Marienbad: Harold: I enjoyed last night. xoxoxoxo Olive Llewellyn.
Olive stared at the message and felt just a touch of vertigo. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t know who wrote that.’
(She was distracted for days afterward by the thought of a shadow Olive moving over the landscape, on a kind of parallel tour, writing uncharacteristic messages in Olive’s books)” (89)

“Construction just began on the first of the Far Colonies” (90)

“‘To Alpha Centauri,’ she said” (91)

“In Buenos Aires, Olive met a woman who wanted to show her a tattoo. ‘I hope this isn’t weird,’ she said, and rolled up her sleeve to reveal a quote from the book: We knew it was coming, in a beautiful curly script on her left shoulder. Olive’s breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t just a line from Marienbad, it was a tattoo in Marienbad. In the second half of the novel, her character Gaspery-Jacques had the line tattooed on his left arm. You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin” (91)

Commentator’s Note: Echoing phrases. Also, cf. Gaspery pp. 53, 91

“doesn’t everything seem obvious in retrospect?” (92)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 121

“Titan … a so-called Realist colony, one of the outposts whose settlers had decided on clear domes in order to experience the true colours of the Titanian atmosphere—and strange fashions, this thing all the teenagers were doing that involved painting their faces like pixels, big squares of colour that were supposed to defeat the facial-recognition software but that had the side effect of making them look like deranged clowns” (92)

“‘Your first novel was, of course, Swimming Stars with Goldflitter. Will you tell me about that title?’
‘Sure, yes. I was working in AI training. So, you know, correcting awkward renderings from the translator bots’” (92)

“The description had somehow been rendered as seven motives for verse, and then one of the candle descriptions was swimming stars with goldflitter. The beauty of those phrases, I don’t know, it just stopped me cold” (93)

Commentator’s Note: Echoing phrases

“all of the questions were about Marienbad, which was awkward because Jessica was there too” (94)

“‘I wanted to ask Olive about the death of the prophet in Marienbad,’ the man in the audience said. Jessica sighed and slumped a little in her chair. ‘It could have been a much bigger moment, but you decided to make it a relatively small, notclimactic event.’
‘Really? I thought of it as climactic,’ Olive said, as mildly as possible” (94)

Commentator’s Note: Sounds like more real feedback on Station Eleven

“‘You’re a master of deflection,’ Jessica murmured, without looking at her. ‘You’re like some kind of deflection ninja …’ ‘Thank you,’ Olive said, although she knew it wasn’t a compliment” (94-95)

“‘You know the phrase I keep thinking about?’ a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. ‘“The chickens are coming home to roost.” Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never “You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.” It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.’
Scattered laughter and applause. A man in the audience was having a coughing fit. He left quickly, bent over in an apologetic way. Olive wrote no good chickens in the margin of her festival program” (95)

“Was the death of the prophet in Marienbad too anticlimactic?” (95)

“… maybe the death really was too casual, in the way he went from perfect health to death over the course of a paragraph and the story kept moving without him…” (95)

“… but on the other hand, isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us? But obviously Marienbad was fiction, i.e., reality wasn’t relevant to the question at hand, and maybe the death of the prophet really was a flaw” (95-96)

Commentator’s Note: Must art be without flaw?

“‘I write books,’ Olive said.
‘For children?’ he asked” (96)

Commentator’s Note: Constant diminishment throughout the tour

“Gaspery Roberts, Contingencies Magazine” (97)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 91

“‘My pleasure. Do you mind if I ask about your name? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Gaspery.’
‘I’ll tell you something even stranger,’ he said. ‘My first name is actually Gaspery-Jacques.’
‘Seriously? I thought I’d made up the name for that character in Marienbad’” (97)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 91, fiction can bleed into the world

“‘It’s hard to know what we know sometimes, isn’t it?’” (98)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Oscar on trial, The Glass Hotel

“‘I’ve never been interested in auto-fiction,’ Olive said” (98)

Commentator’s Note: Until Sea of Tranquility, of course

4 / Bad Chickens / 2401

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 95 “no good chickens”

1

“No star burns forever. You can say ‘It’s the end of the world’ and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not ‘civilization,’ whatever that is, but the actual planet” (103)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Alkaitis’s cell in The Glass Hotel

“Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren’t annihilating” (103)

“A year before I began my training at the Time Institute” (103)

Commentator’s Note: Time Institute, shift to first person

“Those are the worlds that end in our day-to-day lives, these stopped children, these annihilating losses, but at the end of Earth there will be actual, literal annihilation, hence the colonies” (104)

“‘Because we’ll have to,’ the president of China said, at the press conference where construction on the first colony was announced, ‘eventually, whether we want to of not, unless we want all of human history and achievement to get sucked into a supernova a few million years down the line’” (104)

“One of them raised his hand: ‘Are we sure it’s going to be a supernova?’…
‘Of course not,’ the president said. ‘It could be anything. Rogue planet, asteroid storm, you name it. The point is that we’re orbiting a star, and all stars eventually die’” (104-105)

“‘But if the star dies,’ I said to Zoey, ‘obviously the Earth’s moon goes with it.’
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but we’re just the prototype, Gaspery’” (105)

Commentator’s Note: Our first person, roosting chicken, Gaspery

“Colony Two … the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-fourhour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there were two straight weeks of night” (107)

“‘Colony Two’ drifted out of common parlance; everyone called it the Night City. It was the place where the sky was always black. I grew up in the Night City. My walk to school took me past the childhood home of Olive Llewellyn” (107)

“I paid the house no attention, until my mother told me she’d named me after a peripheral character in Marienbad, Llewellyn’s most famous book” (108)

“the Periphery Road, which circled the interior of the Night City dome. Cross the road and there was a strange, wild area, no more than fifty feet deep, a strip of wilderness between the road and the dome. Scrub brush, dust, stray plants, garbage. It was a forgotten kind of place” (109)

“I liked the wildness of it, the mild sense of danger inherent in a forgotten kingdom” (109)

“Our mother had worked at the post office since we were very young, but in her last hours she thought she was doing postdoctoral work in a physics lab again, murmuring in a confused way about equations and the simulation hypothesis” (110)

“‘The simulation hypothesis? Yeah.’ She didn’t open her eyes. ‘Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation’” (111)

“‘Okay, but if we’re living in a computer,’ I said, ‘whose computer is it?’
‘Who knows? Humans, a few hundred years into the future? An alien intelligence? It’s not a mainstream theory, but it comes up every so often at the Time Institute.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Oh god, pretend I didn’t say that. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have.’
‘Pretend you didn’t say what?’
‘The Time Institute part’” (111)

“It’s the attention part that’s hard to hire for,’ she said.’ Distraction is a problem, generally speaking’” (112-113)

“‘Your score was high. Tell me, do you agree with your test results? Can you pay attention?’
… it seemed to me that I’d been paying close attention my entire life. I hadn’t been successful at very many things, but I’d always been good at watching” (113)

“‘You ever go back there? To the Night City?’
‘Never,’ she said” (113)

“Never to the Night City. The phrase had a rhythm that pleased me” (114)

Commentator’s Note: So many echoing phrases in this book

“There was a man on a stage, surrounded by bulky antique machines of some kind, inscrutable instruments. Above his head was an old-fashioned screen, a rectangle of white floating there in the dim light. It seemed to me that the scene we were looking at was quite old” (117)

Commentator’s Note: Paul, The Glass Hotel

“‘A friend sent this to me,’ Zoey said. ‘She works in the art history department.’
‘Who is he? The guy in the projection.’
‘Paul James Smith’” (118)

“We knew it was coming” (119)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 91

“Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? 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” (120)

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step” (120-121)

Commentator’s Note: Belatedness, nachträglichkeit. Also cf. p. 92

“We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies—just in case—but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home?” (121)

“(We were still thinking in terms of getting work done. The most shocking thing in retrospect was the degree to which all of us completely missed the point)” (121)

“That flash of darkness, then the forest rising around him, what was that?
It hit him all at once: an afterlife.
The darkness was death, he told himself. The forest was the after” (123)

Commentator’s Note: Ghosts, forest graveyard, counterlife

“‘You remember that weird Zephyr bug a couple years this only lasted a day or two, but sometimes you’d open a text file on your device and you’d hear whatever music you’d been listening to last?
…
‘It was file corruption’” (127)

“‘If moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another, then, well, one way you could think of those moments, Gaspery, is to think of them as corrupted files’” (128)

“‘But if moments are files. . .’ I couldn’t finish the sentence. The room we were in seemed much less real than it had only a moment ago. The desk is real, I told myself. The wilted flowers on the desk are real. The blue paint on the walls. Zoey’s hair. My hands. The carpet’” (128)

“If we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation?” (129)

“How do you investigate reality?” (130)

“I remembered the news stories when time travel was invented and then immediately made illegal outside of government facilities. I remembered a chapter from a criminology textbook dedicated to the near-annihilating nightmare of the so-called Rose Loop, when history had changed twenty-seven times before the rogue traveller was taken out of commission and his damage undone. I knew that one hundred forty-one of the two hundred and five people serving life sentences on the moon were there because they’d attempted time travel. It didn’t matter if they’d been successful or not; the attempt was enough to send you away for life” (130)

“The letter writer went to war, returned home to England a broken man, and died in an insane asylum. Olive Llewellyn died on Earth. A pandemic broke out while she was on a book tour” (135)

“‘I almost left the Time Institute a few years ago,’ she said.
‘I agreed to stay on condition that I never have to travel again’” (135)

“‘The job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment,’ she said finally. ‘Did I say almost? Not almost inhuman, actually inhuman” (136)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 167

“‘We don’t know that we’re living in a simulation, and I don’t know that panic is quite the word. More like terminal ennui.’
I decided to look up ennui later. There are words you encounter all your life without knowing what they mean” (137)

6

“‘We safeguard the integrity of our time line,’ he said. ‘We investigate anomalies’” (142)

“‘The aspect of our work that relates to the anomaly,’ he said, ‘is a continuing investigation into whether we’re living in a simulation’” (144)

“‘There’s a faction,’ he said carefully, ‘myself among them, that believes time travel works better than it should’” (144)

“‘I mean that there are fewer loops than one might reasonably expect. I mean that sometimes we change the time line and then the time line seems to repair itself, in a way that doesn’t make sense to me. The course of history should be irrevocably altered every single time we travel back in the time line, but, well, it isn’t. Sometimes events seemingly change to accommodate the time traveller’s interference, so that a generation later it’s as if the traveller were never there’” (145)

7

“All three colonies had rivers, for mental health reasons, running along identical white stone riverbeds, with identical white stone bridges arcing across them. They were engineering marvels. They all sounded exactly the same” (148)

“Is there an unease that’s specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you?” (148)

“the Night City river was a dark and sparkling thing, reflecting both sunlight and the blackness of space. The Colony One river was pale and milky, reflecting the fake clouds on the dome” (149)

“Here’s the metric: they only go back and undo the damage if the damage affects the Time Institute” (150)

“I’m a bureaucrat … As is the Time Institute. The premier research university on the moon, possessor of the only working time machine in existence, intimately enmeshed in government and in law enforcement. Even one of those things would imply a formidable bureaucracy, don’t you think? What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection” (151)

“The hotel [job] was the past. I wanted the future” (152)

“I heard [Zoey] was in love with a traveller, then the traveller went rogue and got lost in time” (154)

9

“The training wasn’t like immersing myself in a different world. It was like immersing myself in successive different worlds, these moments that had arisen one after another after another, worlds fading out so gradually that their loss was apparent only in retrospect” (157)

10

“I had a job in hotel security. It was fine. I just stood around a hotel lobby, staring at people. But then, well, I saw an opportunity” (163)

Commentator’s Note: Like all the opportunities seized in The Glass Hotel

11

“You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really…” (166)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 72

“… just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity” (167)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 136

“‘You’ll interview her in Philadelphia, and she’ll die three days later in a hotel room in New York.”+’
‘I know.’ I felt a little sick about it.
Zoey’s face softened. ‘Remember how Mom used to quote Marienbad at us when we were kids?’” (168)

5 / Last Book Tour on Earth / 2203

“It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual” (173)

“What it was like to leave Earth:
A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then-it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble-there was black space” (175)

“Olive sat close to the doors, for increased airflow—it was all coming back to her now, all of her research into pandemics” (177)

“This will be our lives now, she thought dully, memorizing which surfaces we’ve touched” (179)

“‘We could think of it as an opportunity,’ Dion said. ‘To think about how to re-enter the world,’ Dion said, ‘when re-entry is possible.’ There were certain friends he didn’t miss, he said. He was quietly applying for new jobs” (180-181)

“In lockdown, there was a new kind of travel, but that didn’t seem the right word. There was a new kind of anti-travel. In the evenings Olive keyed a series of codes into her device, donned a headset that covered her eyes, and entered the holospace” (181)

“but the unreality was painfully flat” (181)

“‘I don’t know why it’s so tiring,’ he said. ‘So much more tiring than normal meetings, I mean.’
‘I think it’s because it isn’t real’” (181)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 128

“‘Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,’ Dion said” (182)

“‘The Night City’s beautiful in this era,’ he said finally. ‘I know.’ She was crying, Olive could hear it in her voice. ‘It isn’t the Night City yet’” (184-185)

“‘Could we play Enchanted Forest?’ Sylvie asked.
‘Of course,’ Olive said. ‘Let’s play for a few minutes, till you feel sleepy.’ Sylvie shivered with delight. The Enchanted Forest was a new invention: Sylvie had never gone in for imaginary friends, but in lockdown she had an entire kingdom filled with them, and she was their queen” (186)

“The portal door opens” (186)

Commentator’s Note: The gates of the forest

“In nonspace. Nowhere” (186)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Glass Hotel, outside of time, counterlife

“‘An interesting question,’ Olive said, ‘which I’d like to consider in these last few minutes, is why there’s been such interest in postapocalyptic literature over this past decade or so’” (187)

Commentator’s Note: In 2014 or 2203

“One person suggested to me that it had to do with economic inequality, that in a world that can seem fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over” (187)

“‘Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honourable people’” (188)

“‘Some people have suggested to me that it’s about the catastrophes on Earth’” (188)

“‘the problem with that theory is our anxiety is nothing new. When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?’” (188-189)

“my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world” (189)

“In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear, Captain George Vancouver stands on the deck of the HMS Discovery, gazing anxiously out at a landscape with no people in it” (189)

“‘What if it always is the end of the world?’
…
‘Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,’ Olive said, ‘as a continuous and neverending process’” (190)

“‘My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it’” (191)

“‘I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,’ Olive said.
‘Interesting. Can you tell me about it?’
‘I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged’” (191)

Commentator’s Note: More auto-fiction

“‘I’ve been in lockdown for one hundred and nine days,’ Olive said. ‘I think I just wanted to write something set as far away as possible from my apartment’” (192)

“‘There’s death all around us. I don’t want to write about anything real’” (193)

“On another night of searching, a centuriesold academic journal yielded a reference to a Gaspery J. Roberts. The journal had been devoted to prison reform. The hit sent Olive down a rabbit hole, at the end of which she found prison records from Earth: Gaspery J. Roberts had been sentenced to fifty years for a double homicide in Ohio in the late twentieth century. But there was no picture, so Olive couldn’t be sure it was the same man” (193)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 55

“Jessica Marley’s insufferable little coming-of-age-on-the-moon novel. Look, she wanted to tell her, there’s no pain in unreality happening here. A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life” (194)

6 / Mirella and Vincent / file corruption

“‘If you were in my position, Zoey, what would you do?’
‘It’s hard for me to imagine things that aren’t real,’ she said” (200)

“‘I might try to solve the anomaly,’ she said.
…
‘It took our best research teams a year to figure out these coordinates’
…
‘We don’t know the time, we only know the day and the place’” (201)

Commentator’s Note: No time, because it is all of the superimposed times. File corruption.

“He was on the beach at Caiette” (202)

“for himself, he realized, the ocean carried no weight in his heart, it featured in none of his childhood memories and none of the important moments of his life” (203)

Commentator’s Note: Unlike Vincent

“The ground was too soft; branches caught at his clothes; he felt assailed from all sides” (203)

“Another thing he didn’t like about forests was the constant sound. It wasn’t the steady white noise of the moon cities … There was no pattern to the white noise of a forest, and the randomness put Gaspery on edge” (204)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Order and disorder in The Glass Hotel

“It’s one thing to know in the abstract that one moment might corrupt another moment; it’s another to experience both moments at once; it’s something else again to suspect what it might mean” (205)

3

“what makes a world real?” (206)

“I saw it! I saw the file corruption! It’s real, Zoey”

“They were shaking hands, which even after all of his cultural-sensitivity training seemed like a bizarre thing to do in flu season” (209)

“These people have no direct experience of pandemics, he reminded himself. None of them were old enough to remember the winter of 1918-1919; Ebola was a few years out and would mostly be confined to the other side of the Atlantic; Covid-19 would not arrive for another thirteen years” (210)

7 / Remittance / 1918, 1990, 2008

Commentator’s Note: Three remittances

1

“Edwin had survived Passchendaele. No, survived was the wrong word. Edwin’s animate body had returned from Passchendaele. He thought of his body now in strictly mechanical terms … It was ficult to be alive in the world” (218)

“Moments in time can corrupt one another. There was a derangement, but it had nothing to do with you. You’re just a man who saw it” (221)

“At that moment, at least, you were not hallucinating. You were experiencing a moment from elsewhere in time” (222)

2

“‘I’d do it again,’ Gaspery said. ‘I wouldn’t even hesitate’” (225)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Miranda, Station Eleven, “repent nothing”

“Two gunshots, in quick succession” (227)

“‘Mirella,’ he said” (228)

Commentator’s Note: His “crime” had always-already happened

5

“No star burns forever” (229)

“If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty to pull them from the water. His conscience was clear” (230)

“In the early evenings Gaspery liked to sit on the farthest possible edge of his bunk, almost falling off the end, because from that angle there was a sliver of sky visible through the window, and through it he could see the moon” (230)

8 / Anomaly

1

“Is this the promised end?
A line from Olive Llewellyn’s novel Marienbad, but really a quote from Shakespeare. I found it in the prison library five or six years in, in a paperback with a missing cover” (233)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. p. 194. Now a thought of Olive’s echoes here, not a written phrase. Beyond quotation. File corruption.

4

“‘I’ve paid a great deal of money to the owners, and you can stay here indefinitely, as a boarder’” (237)

Commentator’s Note: Remittance

8

“This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watching the airships rise up like fireflies on the horizon over Oklahoma City, this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life” (246)

12

“I was the anomaly. No, that’s not fair. I triggered the anomaly. How did no one catch that I was interviewing myself?” (250)

“As the man walked toward me, crossing Olive Llewellyn’s path, the air seemed to ripple behind him” (250-251)

“The rippling intensified; the software, if that was the word for it, whatever unknowable engine kept our world intact, was struggling to reconcile the impossibility of both of us being here. But it wasn’t just that the same person was in the same place twice; the engine, the intelligence, the software, whatever it was, it had detected a third Gaspery, somewhere else altogether in time and space, in the forest at Caiette, and now things were truly coming apart: this moment was corrupted, but so was that place, that point in the forest” (251)

“we were superimposed on one another” (251)

“Time was running smoothly again. The file corruption was repairing itself, the threads of the simulation knitting into place around us” (251)

13

“I sometimes thought it was as if the airships were falling upward, gravity reversed. They filled with a cargo of blank-faced commuters, then fell toward the sky … I thought of their souls moving fast through the morning sky” (254)

“What I didn’t tell him: I felt that without Talia I might disappear into thin air, out there by myself … Loneliness wasn’t a strong enough word for it. All that empty space” (254)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Loneliness, empty hotel in The Glass Hotel

“In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush” (255)

Notes and Acknowledgments

“The quote referenced on page 72, ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’ is from John Buchan’s 1919 novel Mr. Standfast” (257)

Commentator’s Note: Standfast, a “still point”