'All Our Wrong Todays' is your next fast-reading, mind-expanding, science fiction romance
If you're a fan of books that leave you gaping open-mouthed like Keanu Reeves at the end of The Matrix when you turn the final page, you're going to love All Our Wrong Todays.
This is a debut novel by Canadian screenwriter Elan Mastai, whose work you might know if you've seen the Daniel Radcliffe movie What If. Mastai reportedly received an eye-popping $1.25 million advance for All Our Wrong Todays. Naturally the hype level around the novel, out this month, has been high.
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I'm pleased to report that the hope lives up to the hype. All Our Wrong Todays is the endearing transdimensional tale of Tom Barren. Barren is the indolent son of a great scientist in a flying car-filled, there's-my-jetpack version of 2016. Through a series of unfortunate events that include getting an ex-astronaut pregnant, Barren accidentally destroys his utopian world and gets stuck in our darkest timeline instead.
More specifically, he gets stuck in the head of John Barren, the alternate-universe version of him. Turns out the two Barrens have been mentally connected all their lives. John is literally plagiarizing Tom's now-destroyed perfect Earth; he has become a famous architect by drawing its futuristic buildings from memory. (Frank Gehry, do you have something you'd like to tell us?)
That only scratches the surface of what this fast-paced novel is about. Much of it revolves around the events of one day in 1965 in San Francisco, where a scientist is about to throw a lever on an experimental energy device that will either lead to Tom Barren's perfect world, do nothing, or cause a global apocalypse.
It's not too spoiler-ish to say that over the course of the novel, all three of these outcomes happen — or that a third, apocalyptic version of Barren eventually enters his shared consciousness.
If all of this sounds like the setup for Kurt Vonnegut's whimsical brand of science fiction satire, you'd be right to make that vaunted comparison. I also detected a touch of Douglas Adams in Mastai's description of the utopian 2016: lots of asides about why time travelers need to wear suits made of their own skin, or why that world has so much abundance that people cycle through fashion trends in the space of a day, dropping old clothes into roving recyclers.
But I wouldn't call All Our Wrong Todays a comedy. As much as it romps, it has a sad center. As with Vonnegut and Adams, there are serious points being made about our world — our misguided quest to have technology solve all our problems, our deep disgust that it's 20-goddamn-17 and the future we were promised seems to have forgotten us.
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It's also about relationships — between parent and child as much as lovers. There are enough sad, tender moments between various couples for the book to qualify as a romance. Tom Barren falls in love with Penny, our world's version of the astronaut he impregnated, then has to deal with the fact that John Barren takes over his head for one day and abuses Penny.
As a novel, this collection of premises may seem doomed to go off the rails. It could have been like three stories trying to tell themselves in the same space — Jekyll and Hyde and Cat's Cradle and The Time Traveler's Wife all jostling around uncomfortably in the same space like the three versions of Barren.
But Mastai pulls it off because he knows, as a screenwriter, to keep scenes short. Most chapters are three pages or less. So even when he gets experimental with them — there's a time-twisted chapter meant to be read backwards, for example — you're not going to get too bogged down. And yet the poetic weight of meaning is ever-present in these short nuggets.
Reality Shock
To give the book another huge compliment, I was reminded of Ursula LeGuin's magnificent 1971 short novel The Lathe of Heaven. That book also had a premise that sounds ripe for jokes and whimsy — guy walks into a psychiatrist and complains that his bad dreams change the nature of reality around him; psychiatrist decides to use the guy's power for fame and fortune. And indeed, they're both funny, snappy reads.
But deep into these tales you start to feel a little weird, like the walls of your own reality are starting to shift. You start to wonder things that might get you strange looks if you talked to friends about them, like how maybe our best creative ideas come from alternate-reality versions of us. You may find yourself doing Google searches on the multiverse — yep, physicists still think it's a thing — and wondering how porous its boundaries are.
The joy of a book, Tom Barren says, is that it's a telepathic compact between writer and reader. He's lamenting the fact that his almost-perfect world has abandoned books for egotistical forms of narrative that beam directly into your brain and form stories around your life. But books aren't about us, and thank goodness.
We don't read to be alone; we read to know we're not alone. You'll certainly draw that conclusion from Wrong Todays — and you'll also end it with the feeling that maybe our present dystopia has actually been the utopia all along.
Woah.
