Emily St. John Mandel's SEA OF TRANQUILITY

Ok, friends, I'm calling it: I'm officially over the Simulation Theory. It was interesting, even diverting, for a while, but now the Zoanthropes who can't be trusted to tell the difference between fact and fiction have gotten hold of it have added it to their quiver of arguments in favor of not being their brothers' keepers and they're thus absolved from giving a fuck about anybody else despite what their holy books tell them* and I just can't anymore. 

Ware spoilers for the book, by the way. I 

But it do keep coming up in the books I'm reading and even if it wasn't just a gussied-up version of "characters who know or realized they're in a novel" it's come up TOO MUCH and the next time I see it, even if it's a fucking prize-winning Instant Classic, I'm not gonna bother finishing that book. 

Anyway, Sea of Tranquility. Which commits another sin-in-my-book regarding books in that the main point-of-view character is a novelist.

I realize that I already sound like I hated this, but I didn't. Author Emily St. John Mandel has created a cast of characters, living in different periods of history and the Future, that I felt like I understood and quickly came to care about, and put them in interesting situations within their own timelines and experiences that kept me caring even when I realized that they were really just parts in a familiar Simulated machine, and the book is pretty short (by my standards anyway) so I didn't feel the need to put it aside or drop it altogether at the time, though about 2/3 of the way through it I started feeling like I'd read it all before fairly recently.

The book takes place in, in chronological order, frontier British Columbia, present day New York City, a book tour around the world in the 22nd century, and a colonized Moon in the 23rd, with the Moon being home to three domed cities (one of which is charmingly dilapidated to represent the diminished glamor of life on the moon when other planets in our solar system and in another solar system are now also settled by humans) and a Time Institute which, yes, is a giant time travel bureaucracy (yay!)... tasked with gathering evidence to finaly prove or disprove the Simulation Theory, because An Anomaly has crept up (yawn) which allows all of the aforementioned points in space-time to connect and bleed into each other, but just for a moment -- an arresting moment that has inspired, again in chronological order, a letter home describing a wilderness encounter with the Anomaly, a musical-composition-cum-video installation featuring a glimpse of the Anomaly, and a vividly described passage in a novel that can only be describing an enounter with the Anomaly (but written by someone who grew up on the Moon!).

The Time Institute has noticed these artistic coincidences, sent Time Travelers to investigate them, and has concluded that this strongly indicates a Glitch in the Simulation (yawn) that needs further investigation. Enter one Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a somewhat wayward divorced man in his 30s who was named after a character in the Novel and whose name also appears in the initial stories of the other encounters with the Anomaly. Yawn. Of course he's going to be a Time Traveler. But, to Mandel's credit, for a long time this looked like it was going to be a different kind of coincidence -- a family name passed on to descendants, perhaps? 

*Which, those same holy books seem awfully prone as it is to persuading their adherents that this fragile little planet whose surface we cling to was given to us to dominate and so we don't bear any responsibility for taking care of it or making sure its habitable for other life forms who aren't of immediate economic utility to us. Why, yes, it drives me crazy that so many people consider these texts to be the Ne Plus Ultra of morality when they actually seem to demand the bare minimum of same of The Faithful. And that The Faithful, even as they scream for everybody to adhere to their idiosyncratic interpretations of holy writ, seem in their own conduct to regard these texts more as guidelines than absolutes. Slavish enforced obedience for others, freedom to cherry pick for me...