All Our Wrong Todays Is the Time Travel Book We Need Right Now
There’s so much to discuss in Elan Mastai’s brilliant debut All Our Wrong Todays, we’re going to have to get the plot summary out of the way fast: it is the memoir of a man named Tom Barren, frustrated resident of a candy-coated version of present day American, an idyllic place thanks to a 1965 experiment that led to the discovery of a source of clean, limitless energy. The Goettreider Engine transforms the world into a retro, Jetsons-style utopia where technology has made everything better.
Tom’s brilliant father invents a time machine that uses the engine’s own radiation signature to return to the momentous occasion of its initial test. Tom is picked to tag along with the team of “chrononauts” who will travel back in time, but when a series of heartbreaking events scuttle that mission, Tom decides to go back all by himself. His actions in the past disrupt the first test of the Goettreider Engine, and when Tom returns to the future, he finds himself in our version of 2016, which is, by the standards of the ideal world he grew up in, a terrifying, polluted hellscape.
Now that’s a premise.
This book is all big ideas, and Mastai never takes the easy way out—this is a classic time-travel brain-twister. The two concepts to keep in mind: One, when you invent something, you also invent the unforeseen consequences that come along with it (we’d have no plane crashes without airplanes). Two, our reality—the present day we’re all currently attempting to survive—is the darkest timeline our hero is trying to prevent.
Unintended consequences inform the entire novel, which essentially follows Tom as he suffers a series of exponentially bigger accidents. He’s placed on the chrononaut team because his father doesn’t know what to do with him after his mother is killed in a freak accident. He’s paired with the driven, brilliant Penelope Weschler solely because they are genetically matched, leading to dire consequences for them both. He destroys his entire timeline in a fit of grief. Bad luck, this guy.
Once Tom wakes up in our 2016, he has two sets of memories: of the future that never was, but also of John Barren, his alt-timeline analogue, an architect with the same parents—an incredible coincidence, since billions of people were never born due to the change in the timeline. Tom figures out he’s a “temporal drag”—because he caused the time reset, he must exist, and so events conspire to ensure his parents meet and conceive him at precisely the right moment. As he slowly begins to understand the weight of what he’s done, and the consequences of setting things “right” again—resetting things to the original timeline will eliminate billions of other people, including John Barren’s sister—Tom is faced with an impossible, paradoxical decision.
In case you haven’t figured it out, this is a story you won’t be able to predict. Mastai allows you to coast on your assumptions about time travel in sci-fi for a while—because Tom thinks he knows them all too (some things are just going to be popular in every timeline). Who might think you know what to expect from a book about a man trying “reset” a timeline, but you don’t. Tom does, in fact, try to locate the one man who might be able to help him—Lionel Goettreider, the genius who invented the bottomless energy engine in 1965—but what he finds will surprise you, and what happens next will surprise you even more.
Mastai is a gifted storyteller. Tom Barren is a relatable downtrodden narrator who grows and changes in reaction to impossible circumstances. His narration makes meta references to his own manuscript (he’ll suggest you reread specific chapters, or suddenly reveal he’s gone back and edited sections you’ve already read). It’s a mind-bending narrative, but Mastai never loses his way, even as the paradoxes pile up around him.
Read this book. Even if you’re not a fan of time travel. Even if you’re not a fan of sci-fi. If you miss it, go back in time and read it anyway. All Our Wrong Todays is brimming with fun ideas, and an early contender for the most imaginative sci-fi romp of 2017—in our universe anyway.