A time machine, a likable dimwit and a future gone awry
In Canadian screenwriter Elan Mastai’s first novel “All Our Wrong Todays,” Tom Barren, the self-proclaimed idiot son of a genius, travels to the past and accidentally screws up the timeline of the future. Tom, the narrator, calls the story a memoir, but it’s science fiction with a familiar but tweaked utopian-dystopian plot, some fish-out-of-water humor and a couple of romantic storylines.
Tom is also John in another timeline, and much of Tom’s memoir is a novel in John’s head. Anyway, Mastai writes the book in short chapters, sometimes only one or two pages long, like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.” Vonnegut is one of Mastai’s favorite novelists.
Mastai places Tom in 2016. But it’s another timeline, a utopian world where the inventions promised to us in old movies, sci-fi magazines and on “The Jetsons” actually exist. Or as Tom says: “You know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we’d have? Flying cars, robot maids, food pills, teleportation, jet packs, moving sidewalks, ray guns, hover boards, space vacations, and moon bases. All that dazzling, transformative technology our grandparents were certain was right around the corner.”
Tom’s timeline had all that. And we could have, too — if it weren’t for Tom.
An only child and a likable screwup, Tom’s been a remarkable failure, even though his world offers tremendous opportunity. In that world, Lionel Goettreider invented the future on July 11, 1965, Tom says, when he created the socalled Goettreider Engine. The engine, actually a generator, “harnesses the constant rotation of the planet to create boundless energy.”
When you have a clean machine like the Goettreider Engine, there’s no need for dangerous nuclear power or murky coal- or oil-powered energy solutions. Solar, wind, and hydropower become “quaint low-fidelity alternatives.” Enormous problems like pollution and climate change vanish. So there’s plenty of time for people to improve themselves and the things around them. Everything becomes possible. Although Tom admits there were still moral, emotional, and ontological problems, people had plenty of time to work on them.
So, Victor, Tom’s genius father, had plenty of time to invent a time machine and time-travel tourism. He’d planned a test run by sending his chrononauts back to Goettreider’s lab on that celebrated July day in 1965.
Unfortunately, when you invent a new technology, you invent a new accident. Invent nuclear reactors, you invent nuclear meltdown. If you’re in Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” and invent ice-nine, you invent “unintentionally freezing the planet solid.” Sadly for Tom’s mother, she’s killed because someone invented hover-car accidents.
After Mother’s death, Victor sympathetically makes Tom the understudy for Penelope, Victor’s best chrononaut. Tom loves her. After she kills herself, Tom uses Father’s time machine to go back and prevent Penelope’s death. If you’ve watched time-travel movies or read time-travel books, you know that you absolutely must not alter the past, lest you ineradicably screw up the future. Of course, Tom, screw-up that he is, neglects the time machine’s safeguards, goes back to 1965, has the first timetravel accident, and screws up the future.
In the new, relatively dystopic timeline, the one we live in, Tom has two living parents and a sister. He loves another Penelope, but he calls this one Penny. His biggest problem, though, other than trying to save his old world, is that he’s now John Barren, successful architect and all-round louse. He inhabits Tom’s mind and body. All of John’s architectural ideas come from futuristic dreams swiped from Tom’s memory of his utopian world.
Much of Mastai’s novel involves Tom’s trying to save the world and deciding which timeline he wants to live in — the brave new Jetsonian future or a timeline (ours) where he actually has a whole and loving family. So, he bounds back and forth into timelines.
When Tom travels back in time, Mastai has Goettreider talking backward: “Yrros ma I.” Somewhat difficult to read — maybe it’s an acceptable print equivalent of running a reel of film backward. But later in Chapter 127, the sequence of whole words is backward: “1965 to 2016 from travel to machine time prototype father’s his uses Barren Tom, idiocy and, anger, grief, shock by fueled,” which seems massively contrived and quantumly hokey.
As for science fact — Tom’s physicist father complains that most time-travel stories get it wrong. I wonder: What might Stephen Hawking think of Mastai’s time-travel science? What would Vonnegut think? Ah, but there are plenty of nuances that distinguish Mastai’s story from various timetravel clichés. And this novel, for which Mastai’s publisher Dutton reportedly paid $1.25 million, is witty, thoughtful and entertaining. It ought to sell well.
It should play well on the screen, too. Paramount has bought the screen rights; the author is doing the screenplay. How will it do? Time will tell.