ALL OUR WRONG TODAYS

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

Elan Mastai’s debut novel, All our Wrong Todays is a combination time travel, multiple world, and alternate history novel. Mastai focuses on Tom Barren, who lives is not only the narrator and protagonist of the novel, but is in fact writing it, and making frequent asides to the reader to indicate the cleverness and awareness the author has of the audience who will be reading his book. Mastai also piles a variety of different universes on top of each other to give Barren plenty of room to explore.

Barren grew up in the world of the futures, a vision of the 1950s with flying cars, unlimited power, and space travel, all made possible by the invention of Lionel Goettreider which became a major touchstone for the world. Unfortunately, Barren’s own life isn't going so well. The son of a major research scientist, Barren is a neer-do-well who only sees the broken parts of his family. Whenever he has an opportunity to succeed, he screws it up and has gotten the reputation for only working because he is the boss's son. Despite these setbacks, he winds up as a backup chrononaut on his father's time travel experiment, supporting a highly effective woman who he develops a crush on, which accidentally sabotages the mission in time and sends Tom into an alternate universe where he is a successful celebrity architect.

While Barren, known as John Barren, is successful in the new timeline, he is also a jerk. His father is nowhere near as successful, his mother is still alive, and he suddenly has a sister. Nobody in the new timeline, which seems to be ours, has heard of Goettreider and Tom realizes that the architectural concepts that made John successful have filtered over from his own timeline. The two men, Tom and John, wind up struggling for control of the single body, which threatens Tom's chances to establish himself in the new timeline, where he suddenly can get a taste of the success that eluded him.

Mastai seems to enjoy playing with the different timelines and he eventually adds additional timelines, even as Tom comes to the realization that he really does want to go home to his original timeline no matter how bad it was for him. In each timeline, Tom becomes another variety of himself and Mastai and Barren both explore the cause and effect that gets Tom to where he is.

While the characters never really feel fully realizes, they are secondary to the way Mastai plays with the multiple timelines, time travel, and cause and effect. However, even there, it is difficult to plot out how his worlds logically get from the same starting point to the variations he plays with in any sort of organic manner, instead giving the effect that they are the way they are because a higher power, in this case, the author, has decided it is the way things should be.

All Our Wrong Todays works as a humorous exploration of time travel, but the todays that Mastai depicts never feel fully fleshed out. His characters similarly move through these worls with only Tom Barren seeming to have any depth to him, although that may well be a conscious decision on the author's part to show the character in solipsist manner, although if so, it is never addressed directly.

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