[Comments] Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

[Fillyjonk]

APRIL This month's pick is the winner of the GoodReads Choice award for Fiction, TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW, by Gabrielle Zevin, which brings the world of game design to the mainstream. "In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality," says the publisher, and the NYT praises it for taking for granted that everyone (not just game coders and, hey good DMs) understands game design is an art. It takes it's title from a famous soliloquy in MACBETH: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Hey, you know who else took a title right out of here? Faulkner. Okay, Zevin, I see you there. Ambitious. I like it. I want to talk about GAMES and art as immortality and if this story lives up to the hype. Lets get reading!

[bananabadger]

Okay, book club, I'm in for April!
My Rabindranath Tagore book just came in from the reservation queue at the local library, and there's literally 31 people in the queue in front of me for Zevin's book. This one's going to be a purchase so I can start contributing to the discussion by the weekend and I'm putting a hold on our May selection now!

[lostcheerio]

Great! I am also in for this month -- I have a student who has been clamoring for me to read this even though she didn't like it. So hrm.

Badger, next month is our "body of work" themed month, so we were thinking maybe Ursula K. LeGuin? Besides A Wizard of Earthsea and sequels, I have only read Left Hand of Darkness and some short stories. I am thinking of reading The Dispossessed. But the idea of the theme is you can read whatever of her books you choose or short stories too/instead.

[AnotherDragoon]

I'm hoping to join in this month too. There are 6 holds on all the E book copies and the physical copies aren't holdable but 2 are due back at my local library later this month. Is May for LeGuin? I'll try to cue up some Earthsea.
ETA: Nevermind, I was just a hair slow.

[lostcheerio]

I'm imagining it to be like Mythic Quest but more serious.

[bananabadger]

Originally Posted by lostcheerio

Great! I am also in for this month -- I have a student who has been clamoring for me to read this even though she didn't like it. So hrm.

Badger, next month is our "body of work" themed month, so we were thinking maybe Ursula K. LeGuin? Besides A Wizard of Earthsea and sequels, I have only read Left Hand of Darkness and some short stories. I am thinking of reading The Dispossessed. But the idea of the theme is you can read whatever of her books you choose or short stories too/instead.

Cool! I've read Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed (though I don't remember much of the later one). I think I also read one of her children's books when children's books were the hot thing at our house. I have her "Conversations on Writing" on hold!

[bananabadger]

I've got my Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow copy!
Weekend plans locked and set!

[bananabadger]

Finished! I really liked it (the first part of the book way more than the second) and am curious to see what everyone else thinks and to begin our discussion! Also, I want to hear what your favorite fictional video game from the story was--which one would you be most excited to play in real life?

 

The Ichigo series sounds interesting, but I think I'd most like to play the proposed expanded version of The Solution, the one where the factory scene would basically become just the first scene of the game and you would have options to take active sabotage or resistance once you realize what your factory is producing. Most of the other MMOG games with microtransactions that Unfair Games began creating didn't seem that much different from existing games and not terribly interesting.

[lostcheerio]

Bought it, started it, I'm on page 30.

[Fillyjonk]

Bought it. It is looking at me.

I am not looking back.

[ptwiddle]

Finished it a week ago, really liked it, but been partly busy partly putting too much pressure on saying something interesting about it. So, some maybe not interesting things instead just to say things.

Two bits from the first 12 pages out in the open:

1. As a math person, Sam's paper topic "Alternative Approaches to the Banach-Tarski Paradox in Absence of the Axiom of Choice" is amazingly good and real sounding -- The Banach-Tarski paradox says you can can take a sphere and cut it into, like, 13 pieces, and then move those pieces and reassemble them into two spheres as big as the original. It depends crucially on the axiom of choice to choose the 13 pieces -- they obviously can't be anything nice we could do in the real world, but are Cthulhu-nightmare sets that only exist in the real world. So I'd be sort of interested to know what you can do toward it without the axiom of choice.

2. "Playing Dungeons & Dragons in a group of two people is a peculiar, intimate experience" Haven't played one on one, but I've found playing here to be a peculiar, intimate experience. Like, you can know so little about who you're playing with, but writing characters and have them respond -- there's an openness, a riskiness? A not every-day-ness to it, that Peculiar and Intimate just nails for me. In some ways it feels like the games are just backdrop to the relationships, that they aren't super important to the novel, but there's a general stance of "playing games cam be valuable and interesting" of the book that comes through occasionally and I think is a big part of why I loved it so much.

 

I don't know that one jumps out at me? Not Solution in any of its formulations (and should point out, somewhere, the controversy about Solution being inspired by the real world board game Train, but Brenda Romero not being referenced in the book or acknowledges though her husband is?

I'd be very curious to play a bit of Master of Revels, though I sort of expect I'd find I'd enjoy Ichigo more.

Also really interested in Bananabadger liking the first half more -- be curious to hear why? Some things I can imagine/agree on why, but also stuff from the end(ish) I really loved:

 

I mean, kids bounding over games in the hospital, college kids writing their first game -- both more interesting set-ups to me than the running of an established game studio. And Marx's death felt -- manipulative? A bit heavy handed? (I want a discussion of the switch to second person for that chapter, and the title "The NPC", but don't feel like I have anything intelligent to kick it off with).

But I loved the chapter after that, Our Infinite Days, with Sam struggling to get the company back on track and thinking "what would Marx do" and hearing suggestions and advice from Marx in his head just killed me, so I guess I thought it was worth getting manipulated for. The callback to Marx playing Banquo, and the description of Banquo's ghost

“No, I come back as a ghost, but I don’t have any lines. I just show up at the banquet,” Marx said. “I’m not even sure if they’ll have me in the scene, or if it’ll be an empty chair. It depends on how much we’re in Macbeth’s point of view”.

We're very much in Sam's point of view in this chapter, but we still see the ghost.

Towards the very end Sadie has similar thoughts about this:

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.

Maybe it struck out at me because I'd see this idea that we have versions of each other living in our heads before in a negative light, and it had struck me as important and valuable -- In Waking up to what you do (about the Buddhist precepts) Diane Rizzeto has a vivid description somewhere of arguing with a loved on in their head, and getting mad at them, and pointing out that in a way this is silly -- the person isn't actually saying it, you're just imagining they're response, and getting mad at an actual person for what AI version of them inside your head is saying. I catch myself doing it all the time; with people very close, but also, like, arguing politics with my aunts. So to see it be so useful to Sam jumped out at me, though I'm realizing now that a positive version of this is also one of my favourite bits from Mrs. Dalloway, right toward the start:

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?—some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning—indeed they did.

Maybe I'll post something else later, but rather dump things out happenstance than make myself feel like I should work it into a term paper.

[Fillyjonk]

I have read the first chapter. I’m just meeting myself coming and going this month. I’ve read three books for blurbs and I haven’t had time for recreational reading of stuff I just choose or like or want to read. Excuse excuse excuse blah blah blah bad book club member suffer suffer repent.

I did read about it a little bit and I learned that many people find the second have to be weaker than the first half.

[bananabadger]

For me, the first part has a lived-life authenticity to it that the second part lacks.
The surroundings, the details of student life, the backstories of various start-up game teams ... it all seemed a great blend of fictional lives in believable but fascinating settings. The second part, for me, started to stretch out the lives of the protagonists a bit too thinly. The zoomed out timeline with major tragic and celebratory events felt barely sketched in without much reward for the storyline. I do like the details you included from the second half, ptwiddle, but I felt they were fewer and farther apart ... and ultimately, I don't think I was as interested in the "intense platonic love" of the two protagonists through the bird's-eye-view of their middle and later ages as I was interested in their individual stories and in the world they entered into together as a design team.

BUT I love the scenes you pointed out, pTwiddle. Thank you for helping me appreciate the second half more!

[lostcheerio]

Anybody ever read You by Austin Grossman?

[bananabadger]

No … but now I have a strong suspicion I should.