Literature time! “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow”

[Matt_H]

Yesterday I listened to a very interesting podcast interview with Gabrielle Zevin, author of the novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” which is due out next week in the US and presumably around the same time in the UK.

The protagonists are three game developers and the story follows their deep relationship over a period of decades, in parallel with the growth of the computer game industry. The sense I got from the interview is that the author really knows the history of computer games, both through her own experience and the research she did for the book. Born in the late 70s, she grew up playing Oregon Trail, King’s Quest, etc. and her parents spent their careers at IBM and brought home games for her.

I have read enough stories - both in the tech press and the literary scene - by authors who clearly did not experience early computer games growing up, nor did they take the time to do the basic research to make their stories historically realistic. This book sounds like it might be a nice break from that pattern.

Something that I thought was a particularly clever promotional gimmick is that she (or her publisher’s marketing department) hired a developer to create one of the fictional games from the book in real life.

I’d be curious to see if our beloved Amiga gets a mention. Even if she’s from an IBM family, the author is from the same area as me and the book takes place here. We had no shortage of Amiga dealers back in the day and a couple of user groups that would have been known among anyone into computers in the late 80s/early 90s.

I may get this from the library at some point. Does it sound interesting to anyone else?