I ripped through it yesterday in a few hours’ time. It was so… flimsy? Like more of a too-long short story or merely an outline of an idea? It was as if Mandel just had to get something, anything to the publisher to fulfill a contract real quick. The author character made me never ever want to write a book. The characters had no depth, the concepts weren’t fleshed out, and the vision of the future wasn’t credible to me. What did everyone else think?
I enjoy Mandel’s writing stylistically, but I completely agree with you in terms of the substance and weight of her plot and characters. It definitely feels a bit flimsy and lacking. This is part of the reason why I actually thought that the TV adaptation of Station Eleven was SIGNIFICANTLY better, more nuanced and with so much better character development than what Mandel gave us in the book. Sea of Tranquility was fine, but there really was no meat on the bone in terms of the character development or where the story actually took us.