“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”
-Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility
For my birthday, my friend Angel Han gave me Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel, Sea of Tranquility. The pull-quotes in today’s post are from there. Mandel’s Station Eleven is one of my absolute favorite works of fiction, and now, having completed Sea of Tranquility and found it compelling, stirring, inspiring, and deeply satisfying, I’m driven to read The Glass Hotel because Mandel just hasn't missed for me yet.
In the science fiction Sea of Tranquility, technological magic is understated, almost aloof, reminding me of the mundane, matter-of-fact delivery of Haruki Murakami's magical realism in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Here is technology “indistinguishable from magic” (Arthur C. Clark)—interplanetary travel, time travel, and perhaps even wilder and more terrifying new human capacities—and in Mandel’s story, as in my experience of Murakami, the magic/technology serves only to agitate the substrate of a real, organic, familiar world, revealing beauty, wonder, and meaning just beneath the patina of familiarity obscuring its surface.
I recall someone once quipping that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is the element of explainability. Some say that sci-fi deals with the possible (within the constraints of known and theoretical physical laws) while fantasy posits realities which could not possibly exist, or perhaps doesn’t even bother entertaining the question.
I guess I believe that the best fiction (of either type) is good not insofar as it removes us from reality, but rather how it situates us within reality—reality reflected; a reality perhaps simulated or created; but either way, my reality altered through how the journey through a good fiction alters me…
“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.”
And then of course that journey is arguably itself the stuff of real life, be that through a physical reality, an internal one, or a meticulously crafted experience offered by an author, game-maker, programmer, etc… or as Mandel puts it in her book:
“A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
This story kicked up for me some of my reflections from a few months back about Presence and Place, in which I explored how technologies often concern themselves with removing journeys rather than creating new ones, in favor of destinations, which are often unsatisfying, perhaps insofar as they lack the experiential motion, drama, texture, and transformation of journeys. Examples I gave in that piece were how roads and cars separate us from our environment, seemingly reduce and eliminate direct experiential contact with the world we occupy. I said that generative AI like ChatGPT “eliminates the journey of reflection and composition and brings the destination of composed, coherent, at least relatively referenced text mighty close—like how internet encyclopedias and smartphones brought knowledge about any subject impossibly close, instantly accessible, eliminating the previously necessary, slow (experiential) journeys of search, access, research, education, synthesis, recall, etc.”
Sea of Tranquility feels like it might be about the consequence of attempting to be inconsequential via technological separation from the real, about the futility of this endeavor, perhaps because reality ultimately finds us and reckons with us one way or another.
Pandemics, a common theme within Mandel’s books, are like magic too, in all the terrible inscrutability of the technology of their inner workings—more like fantasies than science-fictions if we’re judging on explainability:
“The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
Reflecting on this, my health struggles in recent years (pandemic-related and otherwise) have similarly felt like a type of magic—like a curse, like something nefarious might be sapping the life force from me, for days and weeks at a time. It truly sucks.
But this conceptual reflex is really just playing an old classic from the repertoire of human cognition—anthropomorphizing the vast, unexplainable universe. For every tiny instance of reality presenting phenomena beyond our grasp, we invent and invite in the instigating deity, trickster, or other personality to lay blame on. It makes perfect sense to do this—an Occam’s razor of sorts—the simplest explanation, but only before we have adopted the new faith of scientism that all things will ultimately prove scientifically explainable.
Have I talked already about Meghan O’Gieblyn’s book God, Human, Animal, Machine here? She explores beautifully this exact thing: how compulsively we re-enchant the universe (make it magical) by granting it agency and personality to explain its complexities away.
In truth, my habitual descent in recent years into periods of mild-to-medium unwellness is understandable through another lens, here expressed as metaphor:
This clumpy, roiling cloud of molecules currently daniel-ing (considered by itself, and others, to be “me”) in what once felt like a stable harmony and homeostasis, which I experience as physical health… it simply falls out of rhythm sometimes. It loses completeness in its coherence (both internally and with the environment), and this decline due to asymmetry only becomes more likely as I age. This life is not being sapped by some agentic force. The wave, having crested, is merely losing shape. Attributing its occasional deform and ultimate inevitable collapse (death) to magical forces is absurd, silly, when I consider the fact that its formation at the outset and relative stability over a duration were arguably the more magical phenomena.
The fact is that all waves once formed will eventually collapse. The collapse is the more explainable phenomenon. Consider this a natural law—a fact of science, most easily forgotten when we mistake what we want to happen for what should happen.
In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel also reminds us that the magicalness that we ascribe to uncommon technology isn’t really so uncommon:
“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. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”
35 years before Arthur C. Clark ever said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Agatha Christie quipped that "The supernatural is only the nature of which the laws are not yet understood." Christie clearly belonged to the church of scientism…
This distinction between fantasy and science fiction, between technology and magic… perhaps the big mistake here is thinking that there are not real things in the universe which are and will continue to be ultimately unexplainable. In that last quote I shared, about the technological marvel of interplanetary travel feeling shocking, perhaps indistinguishable from magic, Mandel invokes death, war, and pandemic as similarly world-shaking. We don’t have to fall back on that old anthropomorphizing—the re-enchantment narratives discussed by O’Gieblyn, to accept that the real can be elusive, beyond our conceptual grasp, and yet still be real. The “complexification of the universe and everything” (explained well by
) might mean that there is a threshold at which scientific comprehension will never catch up, because the information is accelerating away from us faster than we can hope to advance (speaking metaphorically).There is a middle ground here, in which the universe is neither predictable and reducible, nor magical… and I think that the sensemaking in complexity crowd occupies that space. I recommend voices like Nora Bateson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Dave Snowden, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Sonja Blignaut, Tyson Yunkaporta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others—there’s a pragmatism and groundedness to their work that evades the excesses of scientism, which have historically demanded of us ultimate explainability of anything we accept to be true; and then there’s an acknowledgment of the sacred, irreducible, perhaps ultimately unreachable that earnestly seeks to avoid the conceptual cul-de-sac of magical thinking…
I genuinely can’t tell how far away we’ve wandered at this point, but let’s return to Mandel and Sea of Tranquility for just one more moment before concluding:
“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.”
This relationship we have with technology, for all its seeming magic—deep down we may realize how often it detaches us from the real and limits our contact with the mysterious and the… experienceable if ultimately irreducible and ungraspable. I refuse to commit to an essentialist framing of this point, because in truth, technology also equips us to experience the world and its complexities. Language, art, and our many forms of communication are technologies. As a photographer, writer, gamer, explorer, etc… I am enhanced in my experiential capacity by technology… but Mandel’s point in the last quote also feels prescient. I do long for a world with less. I think I first realized it when reading Chris Beckett’s sci-fi Dark Eden. I realized that there was something about a technologically-reduced world that I longed for.
Something I appreciate about Tyson Yunkaporta and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing in particular is the clarity with which they explore what it looks like to live in coherence and reciprocal, mutualistic, convivial contact with the complexities of our internal and external worlds. Neither of these authors is particularly anti-technology, but they both describe worlds and ways of being whose technologies consider, account for, and work in concert with the complexities which do and should exist.
I’m gonna close with two quotes which has been in my head since I encountered them in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven earlier this week. I started listening to this book because, having finished Sea of Tranquility, I found myself hungry for more of that mind-altering, world-changing journey that a good science fiction can offer, and I’ve been meaning to spend more time with Le Guin.
The first quote is from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, and it’s the basis for the book’s title. The translation Le Guin used isn’t super accurate, it turns out (something about lathes not existing at the time it was written?), but it gets the point across… and I was kinda shocked to encounter it after I had started drafting this post a few days ago because of how relevant it felt to the themes I’m exploring here about understanding vs. accepting life’s unattainable complexities.
To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
And the second quote speaks for itself, though I should add that it is particularly striking in the context of Le Guin’s story.
“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
I just recently learned Le Guin was influenced heavily by Taoism. I have Wizard of Earthsea, hitting that and then I'll check out Lathe. I have a piece I'm going to publish next week on that apocalyptic, millenialist urge of humans. A definite re-enchantment is in order. Over time, my hope is most people will figure out a relationship with technology a bit healthier than the present moment, a better ratio of tech:nature and tech:relationships.