Time travel and parallel lives: science informs author Emily St. John Mandel’s fiction
Science as a source of ideas
Mandel told Unexplainable host that scientific concepts interest her, especially ideas at the edges of established science. She said she did not study science in school, though she spent years working in a cancer research lab.
Her research-lab work included handling grant budgets, but she said she could not explain how microRNA 335 affects breast cancer metastasis. She also noted that physicists are, in her understanding, roughly divided on whether we live in a multiverse.
Time travel and simulation
Sea of Tranquility was Mandel’s first book with a stronger hard science-fiction element, including a time-traveling detective. She began writing it during the spring of 2020, while promoting The Glass Hotel remotely during the pandemic.
Mandel said time travel quickly raises problems involving causation, loops and paradoxes. To make the premise work in her story, she introduced the simulation hypothesis: the idea that reality is a simulation.
A life not taken
Mandel’s new book, Exit Party, centers on the multiverse and the idea of doppelgängers. She said she had been considering doppelgängers for years as a way to think about a counter life.
That counter life is the one a person might have experienced after moving to another city, choosing a different job or marrying someone else. Mandel wondered whether a doppelgänger could represent that alternative self.
Key points
- Mandel says scientific ideas interest her, despite having no formal science education.
- She used the simulation hypothesis to help address time-travel paradoxes in Sea of Tranquility.
- Exit Party explores the multiverse, doppelgängers and lives shaped by different choices.