Sea of Tranquility: A novel

But so much is inevitably left out of any biography, any accounting of any life.

Lived there all my life. But listen, son, by the time I took over the farm, small-scale farming had become mostly a matter of watching. You watch the robots move over the fields. You tinker with their settings sometimes but they’re well-made, they adjust themselves mostly, they don’t need you for much. You play your violin in the field just to keep

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.

“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.”

but the problem with that theory is, our anxiety is nothing new. When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?

“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 honorable people.”

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

(She was, what, thirty-five? In that moment, I found her thrillingly jaded.)

careworn.