2024 the best science fiction novels review

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(as of Dec 02, 2024 02:08:22 UTC - Details)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

“One of [Mandel’s] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.” —The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Reviewer: Megan Rodden
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: one of my all time favorite books
Review: I actually read this book months ago and am just now coming back to review it, because I think about this book all the time. For me, this is a book that pops into my mind on a regular basis, where I come back to the story and the characters and just how well done everything was. I absolutely loved the book. I finished it and sort of just sat for a while. It’s one of those books that makes you think about aspects of life, like its meaning and love and yourself and others etc., but it’s all done subtly throughout the telling of the story (or in this case, five stories that all interconnect). And I think that’s what incredible writing and storytelling can do. to this day I wish I could read this book for the first time, or there could be more to it. But it’s definitely perfect as is, and not only is the story really amazing and entertaining to read, but it subtly hints at things that you find yourself thinking about months later

Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A complex novel about a world always ending.
Review: Sea of Tranquility“A simulated life is still a life” (Gaspery, a character in Sea of Tranquility)Sea of TranquilityBy Emily St. John MandelKnopf: 272 pages, $25Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian writer with a marvelous talent for taking old stories, i.e., pandemics, Ponzi schemes, or time travel, and making them fresh. Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s new novel, demonstrates this. Mandel is often labeled as an author of speculative fiction, science fiction, and auto-fiction. She can combine many plots and have multiple characters, some of them appearing from novel to novel, and yet she ties the threads together.Here is a sample of her clear but often lyrical prose:“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.” A single surreal incident is the core event of Sea of Tranquility.In 1912, an 18-year-old Englishman named Edwin St. John St. Andrew, disillusioned with the British Empire, meets a mysterious stranger and then walks into a Canadian forest. Underneath a giant maple tree, he suddenly feels he is in some vast interior, like a train station or a cathedral. There are notes of violin music. Edwin is terrified by a combination of unearthly sounds. Is he going mad? In 1994, a young woman named Vincent is filming the same tree and sky and hears violin music and unexplained sounds. The same stranger is lurking in the forest.Is time, itself, unraveling with one event bleeding into other time periods? Are there parallel worlds in everyone’s personal story?At a party, years later, Vincent meets a visitor who reveals her spouse is running a Ponzi scheme and that she and her friends will be ruined in a few months. In another scene, a writer named Olive Llewellyn—not unlike Mandel—is warned by the same mysterious visitor to cancel her book tour because something deadly (a pandemic) will soon happen.The mystery man is a time traveler detective named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts living on the moon in the 25th century in a colony called the Night City. He works for a sinister organization called the Time Institute. Gaspery’s assignment is to travel back into the past and discover why separate incidents from different centuries are rupturing and overlapping into each other.Here is where Mandel gets complex with stories within stories.Mandel’s fictional character, novelist Olive Llewellyn, has an individual named Gaspery in her bestseller Marienbad, which was released in the 23rd century. Marienbad is a dystopian novel she wrote on the brink of an actual pandemic. Ironically, this parallels Mandel herself whose huge hit, Stations Eleven—about a pandemic—was published before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. When it did, Mandel resented being called a prophet.Eventually, Gaspery travels back in time to visit Edwin, now a disabled veteran from World War I, and explains to him what his 1912 encounter means. Edwin recognizes Gaspery as the weird stranger from his past. If Edwin is suffering from the war, at least the forest vision was not a hallucination caused by mental illness. This action marks Gaspery as an outlaw and eventual fugitive because he has violated a Time Institute rule of never revealing his purpose.Critics have high praise for Sea of Tranquility. Maureen Corrigan of NPR had this to say: “Sea of Tranquility is a poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters.”Here is Laird Hunt: “Following a superb stylist like Mandel is like watching an expert lacemaker at work: You see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between. As in her best work, including Station Eleven, she is less concerned with endings than with continuity.”Sea of Tranquility ends with an extraordinary reveal.If Emily St. John Mandel’s world is always ending, there remains a sense that Mandel’s very human characters, living and dead, will return to haunt the readers.

Reviewer: Manor Z.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Amazing book and a must read
Review: "Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel is a masterful and captivating journey through time and space, exploring the delicate interconnections between individuals across centuries. Mandel's narrative prowess shines as she weaves together disparate timelines with a subtlety that evokes both wonder and introspection. Her characters are richly drawn, each one grappling with profound questions of existence, memory, and the nature of reality.The novel's intricate plot, which spans from the early 20th century to a distant future, is both complex and accessible, keeping readers engaged while prompting them to reflect on the broader implications of humanity's journey. Mandel's prose is elegant and evocative, capturing the essence of each era with vivid, precise detail."Sea of Tranquility" is not just a story but an experience, a beautifully crafted exploration of the human condition that stays with you long after the final page. It's a testament to Mandel's talent and a must-read for anyone who appreciates thoughtful, beautifully written fiction.

Reviewer: F. Moyer
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Time Travel Novel for the Highbrow Class?
Review: This book was the Goodreads’ top book for science fiction in 2022. Its genre is time travel. Because of the basic time travel paradox (going back in time and killing your father before you were born), the reader of this genre typically must simply suspend belief and instead just relax and let the story sweep the reader along on an adventure (and perhaps tug on your heartstrings as well). But this book isn’t quite like that.The book’s writing has an almost ethereal quality, unlike other time travel stories I’ve read. And there is no adventure sweeping the reader along, instead the book gives the reader a philosophical question and a personal question. The philosophical question: is life real or are we living in a simulation? The personal question: If you went back in time as an observer, could you maintain your objectivity, essentially remaining indifferent to what you knew was going to happen to those you were observing? These two questions are the focus of this story.Bottom Line: Most of this book seemed more like great literature than simply a sci-fi adventure. Perhaps I’m not intellectual enough because, though I liked the writing and thought the story was clever, I missed the adventure.

Reviewer: Blackstar
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Es un bonito libro, mucha presentación, lindas páginas, todo fenomenal

Reviewer: Danilo Moret
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Pacing is great, increasing gradually, and when the story jumps around it’s easy to follow and keep interested. The parallels to our recent moment in history are great. I’m avoiding the story so nothing is spoiled, so just dive in and have fun.

Reviewer: DERRICK L CHO
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Have read the Glass Hotel, and Station 11. This book continues to showcase her storytelling excellence. A great, fun, thoughtful, and inspiring read.

Reviewer: Angelo
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A complex tale of crossed timelines and anomalies, different from most ‘paradox’ time tales, and beautifully written. Well worth a read.

Reviewer: Peer Sylvester
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Ähnlich aufgebaut wie David Mitchells Cloud Atlas springt auch dieses Buch einmal vorwärts und einmal rückwärts in der Zeit. Allerdings sind diese Teile deutlicher miteinander verbunden und bilden eine zusammenhängende Geschichte. Dafür sind die Teile deutlich kürzer - Das Buch ist eher eine Novelle als ein Roman. Dadurch fehlt tatsächlich vielleicht etwas die Tiefe an der einen oder anderen Stelle. Das eigentliche Thema ist dabei ein eher klassisches, dass schon vielfach bearbeitet wurde und eine furchtbar neue Seite kann auch die Autorin nicht abgewinnen - aber die alternative Theorie passt schon sehr gut und lässt auch ein bisschen was zum Spekulieren offen,4 oder 5 Sterne? Ich möchte ein Buch nicht abstrafen, weil es kurz ist. Ich hätte zwar gerne sehr viel länger im Meer der Ruhe verbracht, aber das liegt eben auch daran, dass die Autorin sehr gut schreibt und mMn durchaus interessante Charaktere bietet. Daher vergebe ich die höhere Wertung.