Tomorrow and Tomorrow (novel)
1997 novel by Charles Sheffield
Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a 1997 science fiction novel by Charles Sheffield. The book starts in approximately the year 2020 and follows the protracted adventures of Drake Merlin, in his quest to save his wife from a terminal brain disease, over the course of eons. Similar premises are presented in the 2006 film The Fountain, as well as the Isaac Asimov story "The Last Question".
Plot summary
Originally, Drake is a professional musician, with minor celebrity. When his wife Ana is diagnosed with an unspecified incurable brain disorder, Drake exhausts every option attempting to cure her. Only then does he decide to have her body cryogenically stored, in the hopes future generations will discover an effective treatment. However, Drake is extremely cautious, and in case the future culture doesn't care about her plight, he has himself frozen as well. Furthermore, he devotes all his energies for a decade before his freezing to becoming an expert primary source on the musically notable people of his era. He correctly assumes that if you become the world's foremost expert in any subject, eventually someone will want to write a book on that exact subject. At that time the hypothetical future writer will want to awaken Drake, and he can in turn awaken his wife, if treatment is available.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow (novel)” is 1997 novel by Charles Sheffield. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tomorrow, novel and Charles, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1997 novel by Charles Sheffield” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7820291. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2020 and 2006.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tomorrow and Tomorrow (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.