THE TIME OF HIS LIFE
Novel brings unique twist to old science-fiction trope
All Our Wrong Todays Elan Mastai Doubleday
Fledgling novelist Elan Mastai is enjoying fantastic success — but right now it’s financial. And for him, that’s definitely not enough.
For sure, it’s great that his first novel, an exhilarating time-travel adventure called All Our Wrong Todays, caused a huge buzz at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair and landed him a reported $1.25-million publication deal in North America alone. But this outgoing young Torontonian, while happily celebrating the current state of the family finances, stresses that his greater need is simply for people to like the book.
In other words, he could do without this fixation on the dollarsand-cents aspect.
“I grew up in a family where financial issues were fairly private,” says Mastai, an established screenwriter before turning to fiction.
“So to find this stuff kind of splashed around in headlines does make you a little uncomfortable.”
Still, as a writer whose work reveals a fascination with the human comedy and the way society works, there’s clearly a part of him that’s intrigued by the hype surrounding him.
“When a book is about to come out, there are all sorts of things you feel anxious about that you can’t control,” he says. “You can control the words on the page, but you can’t control the world your book comes out in — you can’t control the marketing or the narrative that develops around your book.”
So here’s his reality check: “The average reader doesn’t care about the deal,” he says bluntly. “That’s something that people in the business are concerned about.”
The Vancouver-born Mastai, whose screenplay for the 2015 romantic comedy The F Word won him international plaudits, knows from his years in film that “vast amounts of money can be expended on movies that are wretched.” So even as he works on his own screen adaptation of All Our Wrong Todays for Paramount, which has snapped up the film rights, he’s cautiously awaiting the all-important verdict of the reading public.
He hopes his novel, published by Doubleday, will deliver the same excitement he experienced when he first encountered science fiction as a youngster.
“My grandfather had an extensive collection of SF from the ’50s and ’60s,” Mastai says. “Growing up, I used to love the garish covers and stories. They really captured my imagination.”
He hopes today’s reader will be similarly seized by his fictional saga of Tom Barren, a young guy we first encounter in a version of 2016 that has more in common with the utopian vision of 1950s science fiction than with the realities of today. Flying cars, ray guns, moving sidewalks, robot maids, avocados that remain perpetually ripe — they’re all part of Tom’s world.
“Most of humanity’s problems have been taken care of by technology,” Mastai says. “There’s no war, no poverty, no hunger. And you don’t have to take any responsibility for making this world a better place.”
But despite this fantastically perfect world, Tom is something of a screw-up, discontented with his career and romantic relationships, and intimidated by the fact that his formidable father is a pioneer in the science of time travel. As his life and self-confidence disintegrate, Tom makes irresponsible use of his father’s invention and, much to his horror, finds himself trapped in an alternative timeline that has landed him in our own experience of 2016, a place that he finds a technological and societal mess.
“He’s acted recklessly and he thinks he can control the consequences,” Mastai says. “But, of course, once you start tinkering with the complexities of time ….” He breaks off and smiles at the juicy potential for such a situation.
“At the beginning of the book, I talk about the idea of accidents — that every time you introduce a new technology you also introduce the accident of that technology. You introduce the car and you introduce the car accident. You introduce the plane, you introduce the plane crash. Introduce the nuclear reactor and you introduce the meltdown.
“And in this story, Tom discovers to his dismay and to the peril of the entire world what the ‘accident’ of the time machine is.”
So Tom ends up facing a dilemma. Does he attempt to rework history and restore his utopian universe or does he try to cope with his new reality?
“Essentially, time travel is a device that thrusts my protagonist into an alternate reality,” Mastai says. “He comes from the 2016 that people in the 1950s thought we were going to have — this techno-utopian fantasy. But because of his mishap with time travel, Tom finds himself stranded in our 2016 — what we think is the real world but what he sees as this terrifying dystopia.”
The germ for this witty, entertaining saga is rooted in Mastai’s own childhood emotions when he got hooked on a futuristic something called a jet pack.
“A big part of me remembers being a kid and lying on a rug in my grandparents’ living room, paging through these old science fiction anthologies and wondering — where’s my jet pack? I was promised a jet pack in these stories, and it didn’t materialize. What happened to the future I was promised?”
With this novel, he was able to indulge himself by creating an alternative version of 2016 where all such magical things are possible.
“In some ways, this book is my way of thrusting myself in that world.”
But what would Mastai himself do if he actually had a choice between the alternative realities depicted in his novel? Would he opt for utopia? He shakes his head.
“No, I would always choose to be in this world even though it’s a harder one, because in this world my choices matter. In this world, I can work every single day in trying to make it the world I want to live in.”