Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
About Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Why This Book Matters
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) is one of those rare novels that feels immediate and classic simultaneously. It’s about friendship, ambition, disability, love, and the collaborative creative process—all woven through the story of video game design. But don’t let the gaming setting fool you. This is literary fiction of the highest order, told with humor, heartbreak, and profound insight into what it means to create something meaningful with another person.
The novel arrived during peak cultural conversation about gaming as art form, about neurodiverse narratives, about female creators being erased from history, and about friendships that matter more than romance. Zevin doesn’t treat gaming as a gimmick. She treats it as what it is: a legitimate medium where the same artistic stakes apply. Game designers are architects, storytellers, and technical artists all at once.
What makes this novel transcendent is that it could be about any creative partnership—music, writing, film. The specifics of game design matter less than the universal story of two people who understand each other in a way no one else ever will, and what happens when that understanding is tested by success, ambition, and the real world.
Plot Summary
Sam Masur is a math genius and Harvard student who experiences the world through a body marked by physical disability. He’s brilliant, funny, isolated by choice and circumstance. When a freak accident at a New Year’s Eve party leaves him concussed, he wakes up in the hospital to find Sadie Green, a girl he knew from high school, sitting by his bedside.
Sadie is creative, ambitious, and somehow still interested in Sam when the rest of the world barely noticed him. They strike up a conversation that lasts through his recovery and beyond. They begin designing a video game together, creating worlds on a computer late into the night. For Sam, this is transcendent. He’s found someone who wants to build something with him.
The novel then spans two decades, following Sam and Sadie as they navigate the video game industry, building games that achieve both critical acclaim and commercial success. They form a company with Marx Watanabe, a charismatic business mind who completes their creative triangle. But success doesn’t solve the fundamental tensions in their relationship. Sam is in love with Sadie, though he never says it directly. Sadie is in love with someone else, and keeps landing in relationships that hurt her.
The book charts the creation of several fictional games, each reflecting where Sam and Sadie are emotionally. It moves through the video game industry’s evolution, the rise of mobile gaming, the very real moments when they nearly break apart. It’s ultimately a story about creative partnership, the specific pain of unrequited love that sustains friendship, the ways disability shapes how you move through the world, and what it means to build something that might outlast you.
Key Themes
Creativity as Collaboration and Competition Sam and Sadie create together, but they’re also individuals with separate visions. The novel explores how the best creative work often comes from productive tension between people who see differently. Their games exist at the intersection of Sam’s mathematical precision and Sadie’s emotional intuition. Zevin shows us that true collaboration requires surrendering control while maintaining your artistic integrity.
Disability as Foundational, Not Peripheral Sam’s physical disability isn’t overcome by the plot. It’s woven through everything—how he experiences intimacy, friendship, professional spaces, even his creative process. Zevin doesn’t make his disability tragic or redemptive. She makes it central to understanding how Sam moves through the world. He’s brilliant partially because his mind works differently, and partially because his body has taught him to problem-solve creatively.
Friendship Versus Romance This novel explores a love story that exists outside the traditional romantic framework. Sam loves Sadie completely, but their primary relationship is friendship and creative partnership. The novel asks: is this love less real because it’s not consummated romantically? Is a life built with someone you love, even if the love isn’t mutual in the exact way you want, a life well-lived? It’s a radical reframing of what love can look like.
The Cost of Ambition Both Sam and Sadie are ambitious, but they want different things at different times. Their ambitions sometimes align and sometimes pull them apart. Zevin doesn’t present ambition as inherently good or bad—it’s just the force that moves people forward, and sometimes forward means away from the people you love.
Artistic Legacy and Mortality The games they create become immortal in a way their personal relationships sometimes struggle to be. There’s something both comforting and devastating about creating something that survives you, that might be played by strangers centuries from now.
Characters
Sam Masur — A mathematical genius shaped by physical disability and exceptional isolation. Sam experiences the world through his mind and through pain, disability, and a body that doesn’t conform to social expectations. He’s funny, guarded, deeply artistic in his technical thinking. On Novelium, you could explore with Sam what it means to love someone platonically while being romantically invested, and how he reconciles ambition with the daily reality of managing pain.
Sadie Green — Ambitious, creative, emotionally intuitive, and perpetually searching for love in the wrong places. Sadie is the dreamer to Sam’s engineer. She’s driven by emotional truth and visual beauty. Her journey involves learning that not every relationship problem can be solved by working harder or trying harder. Talking to Sadie means exploring how talented women navigate the industry, motherhood, complicated desire, and guilt.
Marx Watanabe — The charismatic business mind who completes the creative triangle. Marx is charming, culturally fluent, and often the person who pushes forward when Sam and Sadie are stuck. He’s also the person who sometimes doesn’t understand what drives Sam and Sadie artistically. He represents the business and social world beyond the creative partnership.
Why Talk to These Characters on Novelium
Sam and Sadie spend decades talking to each other, working through creative problems, relationship problems, and life problems through conversation. They’re characters who process out loud, who think in dialogue. Sam is especially someone who would be fascinating to talk to because he’s so cerebral—you could spend hours asking him how he thinks about problems, how disability shapes his perspective, what it felt like to create games that changed people’s lives.
Sadie would be compelling to discuss heartbreak with, creative blocks, the pressure to be the right kind of female creator (not too ambitious, not too angry, not too visible). These are characters built for extended conversation because their entire partnership is sustained through constant communication.
On Novelium, imagine asking Sam about loving someone without being able to tell them, or discussing with Sadie what it felt like to play the games they created together and recognize her own emotional journey reflected back at her through pixels and code.
Who This Book Is For
If you’ve ever had a friendship that felt like your primary relationship. If you’re a creator who understands that your work is inseparable from your emotional life. If you want to read about people who are disabled and neurodiverse not as inspiration porn but as fully realized people with ambitions, flaws, and complicated desires.
This book is for gamers who want to see their medium treated as art. It’s for people who’ve loved someone without the guarantee that their love will be reciprocated in the exact form they wanted. It’s for anyone who’s navigated creative partnership—whether with a co-founder, collaborator, or partner. It’s for readers who appreciate dense, literary fiction that also happens to be deeply moving and, often, hilarious.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is for people in their 20s discovering their ambition, and people in their 50s reflecting on what they created and whether it was worth the cost.