12 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
This is one of a handful of books that I got for Christmas and wouldn't have been a natural choice for me and certainly has been a best seller for quite a while. Putting my preconceived ideas aside that a book with gaming as a central theme wasn't something I would find particularly interesting, it turned out to be a really engrossing and at times a moving book.
The story opens in the mid eighties, Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital setting when she is there whilst her sister is having ongoing treatment for leukemia and Sam is a patient with some catastrophic injuries in the aftermath of a car accident,. Sadie, whilst hanging around the corridors, is directed by a nurse to a games room in which she meets Sam playing Super Mario and we learn this is the first time he has spoken and interacted with anyone since his accident. In the coming together of their enjoyment of games a friendship is borne that spans 30 years.
They bump into each other, again by chance, years later in Boston where they are now at two of the most prestigious universities in the US, Sam at Harvard and Sadie and MIT. Once again their spark is reignited by their mutual love of gaming and decide to write and produce their own game which subsequently becomes an instant success on its launch and makes them both a lot of money before they have even graduated. The money is more important to Sam, unlike Sadie he comes from a background where money is tight, at a later stage we learn that in the car accident which badly damaged his foot, his mother had died alongside him and he was brought up by his kindly Korean grandparents who had made financial sacrifices to send him to university.
Eventually Sadie and Sam go from success to success in the development of further games and forming a company with Sam's roommate and best friend Marx who is also a pivotal character. . Gaming aside at the heart of this book is a love story, but not in a conventional sense, this is essentially a friendship that somehow misses the right time to turn their obvious feelings for each other into something deeper. Sam often shuts himself off and prefers to deal alone with the ongoing physical pain of a very damaged foot which eventually has to be amputated because of a series of infections which he is advised have the potential to lead to sepsis. . Similarly, at times, Sadie also switches off from the world to deal with bouts of ongoing depression. Into that mix, their relationship is sometimes further strained by fame, rivalries, jealousies and feelings of betrayal and the loss of their partner Marx who Sadie has gone on to form a relationship with, although their mutual deep love for each other never entirely leaves them.
In spite of the central theme of gaming not being of much interest to me, I remember my children spending time on things called "Metal Gear Solid" and "Grand Theft Auto" both of which are mentioned in the book. I'm glad to say they didn't spend too much time closeted in darkened rooms in those pursuits, whereas a friend's son, ten years or so younger spent inordinate amounts of time doing just that. Gaming has such a huge reach, a multi million dollar industry, in fact almost certainly a billion dollar industry, and that does come across in this book. I always thought living in a virtual world as opposed to the real world was a waste of life, unless of course you are like the characters in the book and developing your own games, but again that totally consumes them.
The title of the book, conjured up a futuristic feel but I was surprised to learn that it was taken from a soliloquy from Macbeth, in an excerpt that slots very cleverly into the narrative.
Certainly an unusual book it had a filmic quality about it, I could imagine it being turned into a production for say Netflix sometime in the future..In spite of reservations, I enjoyed it and thought it was a beautifully crafted novel.
