I finally got around to reading a novel my mother has been bugging me to read for ages now. It's by Gabrielle Zevin and is called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is one of those titles that looks more and more wrong the more times you type it out in succession. I didn't know much about the book going in other than that it was somehow related to video games, and I deliberately didn't read anything about it prior to starting it, so I had gone in with the (mistaken, as it turns out) assumption that it was going to be another Ready Player One sort of situation.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is rather different, though. While it does indeed draw inspiration from the world of video games, it is not a sci-fi novel, and the games are used more as a backdrop to what is going on rather than in-your-face references. The main story concerns two individuals who meet as children in a hospital: Sam Masur is a traumatised young man with a mangled foot after a car crash that killed his mother, while Sadie Green is an intelligent young woman who had initially been attending the hospital to visit her sister, who had leukaemia, but who subsequently managed to strike up a friendship with Sam.
The pair bond over video games, something which was clearly already important in both of their lives; Sam displays himself to be a skilled player of Super Mario Bros. when Sadie first encounters him, while Sadie has long exchanged in-jokes relating to The Oregon Trail with her sister. Sadie discovers that her interactions with Sam have caused him to speak for the first time in a very long while, and she is encouraged to see him regularly as part of the "community service" requirements for her bat mitzvah. Sam eventually discovers this — helped along by Sadie's rather jealous sister — and, understandably, begins to doubt Sadie's friendship, causing a rift between them that lasts for several years.
The pair meet again by chance several years later, when they are both nineteen years old and studying at institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT. They once again bond over video games; Sadie introduces Sam to a video game she composed called Solution. Solution is an early example of an "art game"; it positions players in the role of someone working at a factory, but "completing" the game reveals that one was actually producing weapons for the Nazis in World War II. Players can alternatively complete the game by uncovering "the truth" about what they are actually up to earlier on.
Aside: real-life developer Brenda Romero believes that Solution is based a little too closely on her board game Train, which had a similar concept of going "surprise! You're a Nazi!" at its conclusion, but, as the name suggests, a different focus. I can see how she arrived at that conclusion — particularly as Zevin acknowledged the game's influence — but Sadie's Solution approaches the matter from a somewhat different angle, and Sadie, rather than Romero, being the creator is important to the story. So I think we can maybe let that slide for now.
Anyway, Solution made people in Sadie's game design class absolutely furious, as you might expect, but Sam sees something in it. And thus begins a rather tempestuous working relationship, as the pair decide to make games together — some of which are huge successes, and others of which are big fat flops.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about video games, but it's also about the creative spirit and the balance young professionals often have to find between truly expressing themselves and doing something that will actually make them some money. It's about the wild mood swings the creative temperament can bring, and about how different ideals can sometimes lead to seemingly irreconcilable differences — and how the truly strong friendships can weather those storms, even if it takes years to do so sometimes.
The games are used as a backdrop to the main story of the relationship between Sam, Sadie and the other people who are part of their lives, both personally and professionally. Author Gabrielle Zevin admits that there are a few anachronisms in terms of the games she mentions and the times at which people are playing or discussing them, but notes that this is all in service of the story. We are, after all, talking about a fictional world that refers to a variety of things that exist in the real world — ranging from the classic arcade game Donkey Kong to the gaming lifestyle website Kotaku — and couples them with events that never actually happened. In this sense, it's an "alternate history" novel of sorts, only this history is about video games rather than, say, Hitler never having been born.
It's an interesting approach. The novel's perspective jumps around in time and in terms of which character it is focusing on at any given time. Sometimes you're "in the moment" as the events of the past are occurring; at others, the narration presents Sam and/or Sadie being "interviewed" by a real-life site (such as Kotaku) about something that never actually happened in the real world, but which was an important occurrence in this alternate history. Aside from a few early hiccups where Zevin refers to "3.25 inch floppy disks" on more than one occasion (which made me wince slightly every time), the effect is mostly very convincing; it doesn't take long before you're swept along with this account of something that could have happened in this world, but which didn't.
The novel is not just about how video games have changed over time. It's also about how attempts to introduce progressive themes into games have, at times, met with uncomfortable challenges. The novel takes this to something of an extreme — more so than anything that has, to my knowledge, happened in the real world — but the point it makes is convincing. As far as I'm aware, no-one has gone and shot up a game company in the real world over the inclusion of gay and transgender characters in a video game, but the idea is depressingly plausible. From a broader perspective, the inclusion of a sequence in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow where one of the major characters is shot dead following such an encounter can be looked on as criticism of gun culture and violence in America, and how more often than not mass shootings are the result of a disaffected white dude who has snapped about something in his life or society.
Some of the most effective sequences in the book are where Zevin isn't afraid to get a bit weird. After the aforementioned shooting sequence, there's a peculiar second-person sequence presented as the reader occupying the role of the fatally shot character in the present tense as their life slips away. There's another sequence later where a depressed Sadie is playing a massively multiplayer online game, but it never actually mentions the character we're following is Sadie; everything is presented "in character" and "in world". Like the world of video game development, the literary techniques that Zevin uses throughout Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow never remain constant; they're always changing, developing, moving on, advancing.
It's also a novel about how women struggle to be taken seriously in what is still perceived to be a "boys' club", even with more and more evidence to the contrary that women have always been a part of gaming. Sadie continually struggles to be seen as the artist she is because Sam is better at the business aspect. Despite being depicted as somewhat awkward in the early hours of the book, he ends up becoming a confident "face of the company" when promoting their work, suggesting that there may be some sort of mental health issues in an autistic/ADHD-adjacent area at work with Sam's character; his behaviour is very consistent with hyperfixations and intense, deep passions for very specific things.
But Sadie struggles too, despite being less obviously "broken" than Sam is. She may not have suffered the traumatic, violent loss of a parent, she may not have physical mobility issues and she may come from a background of relative privilege, but there are times when she struggles. There are times when she finds herself swept up in an abusive relationship because she thinks its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. There are times she falls into an inconsolable depression, when even those closest to her cannot reach her. There are times when she simply doesn't know what to do, despite her intelligence. She suffers, too — perhaps even more than Sam does — and the story of her own trials are an important part of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
I'll refrain from spoiling too much more of the details of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because I do recommend it, even if you're not "a gamer". Having the context of and an understanding of the video games referenced throughout is helpful, certainly, but this is not a story that is specifically about those video games. Instead, they're used to support the narrative and its approach to a fairly mundane but nonetheless impactful alternate history; the thrust of the story is, instead, about love, friendship, creativity, artistry and the range of challenges creative types (with varying degrees of mental health struggles) have faced over the course of the last 30-40 years or so.
So there we go. Now my mother can stop asking me if I've read it yet, because now I have!
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