Hey, everybody. How's it going? Welcome to The Other People Show. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. I'm your host. Thank you for listening. I hope you're doing all right wherever you happen to be. Don't forget to subscribe to the Other People show wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can also watch the program on the Other People YouTube channel. Search for it by name at

YouTube, other PPL, and subscribe there as well. Today, my guest is Emily St. John Mandel, author of the novel, Sea of Tranquility.

And also what came into play is this idea that I've taken from TV writing called Hanging a Lantern on it.

And the idea is, if you have something that almost but doesn't quite work, plot-wise, particularly, you hang a lantern on it.

Sometimes having a character point out the thing that isn't quite working can almost help.

Because it's like the character is an avatar for the skeptical reader.

So that's why in Sea of Tranquility, there's a moment where we're in the year 2401 and there's a guy standing

next to a time machine saying we're not actually sure why this works. We don't know why the

timeline seems to repair itself as if the time traveler were never there every time we send

somebody back. We think the fact that it works at all

might be evidence that we're living in a simulation.

All right, that was Emily St. John Mandel.

Her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility,

is out there now in trade paperback from vintage.

Sea of Tranquility is a time travel story.

It weaves together multiple plot lines. It unfolds across centuries. It binds them all together in surprising and deeply human ways. And I never once

got lost reading this book for all of the traveling that it requires of the reader across time

and space. I was always right there, which is a credit to Emily and her skill as a writer.

This is her second time on The Other People Show.

We first spoke all the way back in May of 2012, which feels like a lifetime ago, more than a decade ago.

And well before the publication of Emily's big breakout novel entitled Station 11, which has sold millions of copies around the

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