Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Athenica Blenew and today I'm going to be

talking to Gabrielle Zeven, the author of the storied life of A.J. Fickory and the prize-winning

children's book elsewhere. Her latest novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, has been described by

Erin Morganstern as a beautifully wrought saga of human connection and the creative process. I'm going

to describe it as bloody

fabulous, if I may. Gabrielle, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure. Firstly, this has got to be my first question. You've written a book

which has nostalgia connected to 80s and 90s gaming. You have not once mentioned the Prince of Persia.

This is a glaring omission. Can you please explain this? It's glaring. It jumped out. Every page, I was like, we're going to get to it. We're going to get to it. No, I apologize for not mentioning the Prince of Persia. You know, there's a really good memoir that he has written that shows the creative process of making the Prince of Persia. But the main reason I would say I did not mention Prince of Persia is because I am not a player of the Prince of Persia. Okay. So this is an honest book that's connected to your real world experiences. Well, as honest as any book is, but I would say that, you know, I did have to play games beyond what I had played myself. So, you know,

it's not like going, you don't go to college for video games. Some people do now, but, like, you know, I didn't. And so I had to approach it more like an English major, which is what I was, you know, going and playing games that were beyond the games I usually played. But Prince of Persia was not one of them. You missed out. Please get an emulator and play it.

Has anyone else been a bit annoyed that you've not mentioned their favorite 80s or 90s games?

Yeah, I think they are. And you know, it's so funny because I think like people don't realize how much games are just lost, you know. It was a thing I experienced at one point, like going back to look for a game that I had liked from childhood, this game called Gold Rush, you know, because games are tied to like particular hardware and things like that, you know, you can have this sort of, you know, seminal storytelling experience for yourself and you can't recreate it because you don't have like a Commodore or whatever it is, you know. And we didn't have the presence of mine in the 80s and 90s. I think it wouldn't be around forever. Right. I don't necessarily think, like, especially with tech, we're not a nostalgic culture in a way. You know, I don't think we're like, let's preserve all these games because someday we'll want to go look at the history of what this storytelling form was.

And it's such a young form, you know, so I'm 44 years old. And the form is pretty much like that age as well, you know. We're almost like the first documenters, if that's such a word. Right. It's like all the way all those silent films were lost too. Right. You know what I mean? Like, you know, there's maybe like 12 left or something,

and they're basically decaying in some, like, frozen attic somewhere, you know.

Did you have that in mind when you conceived this story?

Absolutely. So, you know, the first generation of people to play video games as children were born in the late 70s or early 80s. And in the U.S., we call them the Oregon Trail generation,

because you were likely to have played this game, Oregon Trail in a lab, you know, in a computer

lab somewhere when you were a kid. And I think it's interesting because microgenerations are,

you know, defined by access to technology. Like, did you have a cell phone when you were a kid,

or did you have internet in your house? And so I was interested

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