A fine fictional finish to Sci-Fi Summer

 Welcome back, folks, to the regular routine of LRG and while the world outside has been riff with chaos, the reading waters have been just fine.

Speaking of reading, the Sci-Fi Summer readathon hosted by Michelle Miller at Seasons of Reading has ended and per my usual, I finished two out of the three books chosen for this challenge. Considering the amazing quality of this particular pair, this was a great achievement indeed!

First up was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow , the latest from Gabrielle Zevin. Yes. the title does refer to a Shakespeare quote but the overall theme is the resilience of friendship and video games as storytelling realms.

The center of the plot forms when Sam Madurai runs into Sadie Green during their college days, renewing a broken childhood connection, and upon playing one of Sadie’s prototype game, convinces her to team up with him to become video game creators together.

While they do make for a good artistic partnership, their goals in the field often clash, especially since Sadie’s talents are taken for granted by the male dominated industry and media.

Nevertheless, they do persist in part due to Marx, their mutual friend and business partner (who becomes more than a friend to Sadie over time). However, when an unforeseen event takes Marx out of that equation, can Sam and Sadie heal from this ultimate breach?

Zevin is a wonderful writer as well as a video gamer and it shows in the gorgeous geek prose when talking about that virtual world. One section of the book takes place entirely in a game that’s a cross between The Sims and Oregon Trail, which blends seamlessly into the narrative whole of the story.

This is the third novel that I’ve read by Zevin (Young Jane Young, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry) and so far, she does not miss a beat, book wise. It’s fair to say TATAT is one of the best things that I’ve read this or any other year:

I followed that up with Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility , another mind blower of a book to be sure!

While the plot points are stretched over different places in time, what connects them is Gaspery, a man of the future seeking out witnesses to a temporal event that could explain the true national of reality.

From an exiled British man in Canada of the 1800s to a writer living on a moon colony doing a book tour on Earth in the year 2203, this strange incident that these random people stumbled onto does haunt them in small ways. Yet it is Gaspery whose fate is truly bound by what happened and the answer he seeks is far from expected.

This may sound like a complicated story but it’s not at all.  Mandel glides through these vast connections with a gentle ease that smoothly carries the reader along for an epic ride. The tender depictions of humanity are the strength of the book, making such questions about the nature of our world very down to earth and attainable.

We’re getting a lot of multiverse stories these days and while SOT is perhaps more of a time travel tale, it does hold some of those elements rather well. Definitely a best of the year read , especially if you like the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once:

Much thanks to Michelle Miller for setting the table for another readathon feast and hope everyone who took part in Sci-Fi Summer had as grand a time as I had with their books.

As I said earlier, we are caught up in serious troubled times these days but I do believe in radical hope in that we can still change things for the better. Staying true to our family and friends is a part of that, along with reviving our spirits with a good book or two.

With that in mind, the next readathon will be High Summer in August and I do have a trio of relaxing reads on deck for that occasion. Summer is meant to be a period of mellow relief and we should do that as much as possible for the benefit of all to gather our strength for what lies ahead: