Tomorrow and Tommorrow and Tomorrow is 2022 novel by Gabrielle Zevin and published by Penguin Books through their subsidiary Knopf Publishing Group about two friends from childhood who collaborate on designing video games together as adults and the ups-and-downs of their relationship through the years. The title is taken from the final soliloquy in Shakespeare's
Macbeth.
Following a chance meeting in college Jewish Korean-American Sam Mazer reconnects with his childhood friend Sadie Green who is studying video game development. After playing the student game Sadie designed the pair decide to begin developing video games with their shared talents and background playing games as children when Sam was in hospital.
Zevin’s tenth published work - following
Elsewhere,
The Hole We're In, and
Birthright among others -
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was an immediate bestseller, becoming one of Amazon's Books of 2022 and an inaugural title of the
Jimmy Fallon book club. The film adaptation rights have since been sold to
Paramount.
The novel contains examples of the following tropes:
- The '80s: Sam and his mother, Anna move back to her home city of Los Angeles in time for the 1984 Summer Olympics, with references to Mary Lou Retton and the Soviet boycott.
- The '90s: Sam and Sadie are both in college in the mid 90s when they meet for the first time after years apart and decide to collaborate on making games.
- A Day in the Limelight: Part 7, "NPC", takes place from the point of view of Marx, Sam's college roommate who is mostly treated as a supporting character to Sam and Sadie, and a catalyst to their relationship. Sadly, it takes the form of his Dying Dream after he became a victim of a mass-shooting.
- Abortion Fallout Drama: Sadie has an abortion after becoming pregnant by Dov, along with her trimerous relationship experiences a bout of depression.
- Asian and Nerdy: Sam, who is half-Korean.
- Asian Hooker Stereotype: Invoked:Sam's Broadway actress mother Anna Lee, when she is moving back to Los Angeles from New York anticipates that the only roles in TV shows and movies for her will be those of Asian sex workers in cop shows.
- Audience-Alienating Premise: In Universe example: How Sam perceives some of the games Sadie proposes.
- Both Sides proves to be heavily contested with fans divided on parts they like and dislike.
- Master of the Revels starts off looking like this, but gradually proves to be a success.
- Her student project Solution wherein the player is revealed to work in a German factory during the Second World War and their completion of assigned tasks determines how well they fare in the game juxtaposed with aiding the Nazi war effort shocks some of her classmates.
- Author Appeal: Gabrielle Zevin was introduced to computer programming and video games as a child by her parents who worked for IBM (International Business Machine Corporation) and like Sam, she is biracial with a Korean mother and Jewish father.
- Bondage Is Bad: Sadie's mentor Dov, with whom she has a relationship with, introduces her to BDSM and is often physically and intimately aggressive with her.
- Child of Two Worlds: Sam, who considers himself too Asian to be white and too Jewish to be feel truly Korean.
- Country Matters: Sam calls Sadie this when he finds out she was using her visits to him in hospital to check off her charity commitment for her bat mitzvah. He remembers one of his mother’s boyfriends using it and them subsequently breaking up. Sadie finds his use of it unintentionally funny.
- Creator Couple: Sam and Sadie are a In-Universe example, though they are purely platonic.
- Disappeared Dad:
- Sam's father George Masur.
- Marx, who dies before ever getting to meet his daughter with Sadie.
- The Disease That Shall Not Be Named: Sadie decides to refer to Alice's leukaemia as dysentery as cancer can halt conversations.
- Doting Grandparent: Sam's maternal grandparents, Dong Hyun and Bong Cha Lee never hesitate to shower him, and by extension, Sadie with love and affection or give him advice.
- Elective Mute: According to the nurses at the hospital Sam was apparently this and did not speak to anyone after the accident until he met Sadie in the games room.
- Experimented in College: Among Sam's few sexual partners is one male whom he experimented with.
- Fictional Fan, Real Celebrity: Sadie and Dov to Hideo Kojima.
- Friendly Local Koreatown: Sam's mother comes from Koreatown in Los Angeles, where her mother and father run a local pizza parlor, ironically called Dong and Bong's New York House Style of Pizza.
- Game Show Host: Chip Willingham.
- Girliness Upgrade: Sadie tries wearing dresses and doing her hair to appear more attractive to Dov.
- Heteronormative Crusader: The mass shooters who kill Marx after Sam makes same-sex marriage a feature in Mapleworld.
- History Repeats: Sam's mother Anna left her home city Los Angeles, California for New York City, all the way on the other side of the country in the hopes of being a successful actress on Broadway and felt returning home was a sign of failure. Years later, Sam, now attending Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, feels the same way when considering moving for Zoe's career opportunities and warmer winters for his own health.
- Home Nudist: Marx's composer girlfriend Zoe.
- Homophobic Hate Crime: The mass shooters at Unfair Games who kill Marx and injure Ant are motivated by homophobia and revenge following the addition of same-sex marriage in Mapleworld and one of the shooters, Josh's wife leaving him for a woman she married in the game.
- Ivy League for Everyone: Subverted: Sam attends the traditional academic Harvard, while Sadie goes to the more science-and-technology-orientated MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
- Jewish and Nerdy: Sam and Sadie are seen as, and see themselves as this.
- Karma Houdini: Dov sleeps with students in his Advanced Games seminar at MIT and ropes them into his sexual and manipulative games without any repercussions.
- Killer App: In Universe example: While the Ichigo series is a success for Unfair Games, it is the online game Mapleworld, spun-off from Both Sides that really cements the company and Sam and Sadie as big names in the Games Industry.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: Downplayed: Sadie’s older sister Alice battles leukaemia as a young teen. It is stated to very treatable and Alice goes into remission.
- Lovely Assistant: Anna's essential job on Push That Button!
- Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game: Mapleworld.
- Male Gaze: Invoked: When Sadie sees the scenes where the player can spy on Meryl Silverburgh in Metal Gear Solid undressing she feels alienated, finding it very specifically fetishistic.
- Manly Tears: Dov is reduced to tears after playing Ichigo: A Child of the Sea.
- Meaningful Name: Sam goes by Dr Daedalus when playing Pioneers to reconnect with Sadie. Daedalus, being the name of the ancient Greek builder of the Labyrinth on Crete, fitting as Sam is responsible for building the world of said game.
- Most Gamers Are Male: This is stated to be the default mode of thinking towards video games during the era.
- Nazi Protagonist: The twist in Solution is that the player is either helping or hindering the German national cause in the Second World War depending on how well they accomplish the game's tasks.
- Oblivious to Love: Sam when he realizes he has loved Sadie for years. Even his grandparents knew.
- Preserve Your Gays: Ant, who is gay is shot by Josh and his partner, but survives.
- Quirky Work: In Universe example: Sadie's game for her Advance Gaming class Emily Blaster, a First-Person Shooter wherein the protagonist shoots Emily Dickinson quotes is seen as this.
- Race Fetish: Dov comments to Sadie that Hideo Kojima might have a fetish for Jewish women when she sees Meryl Silverburgh undressing.
- Raised by Grandparents: After Anna dies, Sam is raised by his grandparents.
- Reference Overdosed: The novel contains references to many video games from 1984 into the 2000s.
- Shout-Out: To numerous games from Sam and Sadie’s childhood to their adult careers as developers, including Tetris, Oregon Trail, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and Metal Gear.
- Show Within a Show: The games the characters make, including the Ichigo trilogy (Ichigo: A Child of the Seas, Ichigo: II: Go, Ichigo Go and Ichigo III: Sayonara, Ichigo-San), and Both Sides.
- Sadie's own EmilyBlaster and Solution, and Dov's Dead Sea series.
- The game show Sam's mother, Anna Lee stars on, Press That Button!
- Teacher/Student Romance: Sadie embarks on one with her mentor in the Advanced Games elective at MIT.
- Turn of the Millennium: Sam, Sadie and Marx's company Unfair Games launches their MMORPG Mapleworld exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks.
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: Sam and Sadie.
- Villain Takes an Interest: Dov to Sadie after she tries to find her own vision in designing games. He draws her into an affair while he remains married and hesitates to divorce his wife back in Israel. Despite his professional and financial support of Sam and Sadie in the beginning of their careers his relationship with Sadie proves to be exploitative and damaging to her well-being.
- Wham Line: "My friend says there's an active shooter at a tech company in Venice."
- Yuppie: Sam, Sadie and Marx can be seen as aspiring to and embracing a typical yuppie lifestyle following their move to Los Angeles and the success of Ichigo, starting a technology-based company, frequenting cultural highlights and occasionally doing drugs. Truth in Television: While the yuppie lifestyle was Codified by the generation before them, the Boomers, it was would be maintained as an outward indication of one's success in much of the mainstream.
- Zen Survivor: Sam has very much become one after experiencing so much trauma in his life, from surviving the car crash that killed his mother and left him with a life-long disability in his foot to the limitations it puts on his walking as an adult, eventually having to have it amputated and losing his friend Marx in a mass shooting.
