Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays, the first novel from the Canadian screenwriter, begins in a consciously retro future—a present day as imagined by the 1950s and 1960s, brought into being by the invention in 1965 of a device that generates unlimited clean energy. In the words of protagonist Tom Barren, it’s “the world we were supposed to have.” Barren is the mediocre son of the inventor of a time machine; through that family connection he finds himself training to be a chrononaut alongside far more qualified and less nepotistic candidates. When an accident puts the time travel project on hold, Barren transports himself into the past and, through an entirely in-character act of fucking things up, messes with the past; when he returns, he finds himself in a dystopic world that is entirely his fault: ours.
This is a book to try the patience of experienced science fiction readers. Not for its prose, which is quick and engaging (there are 137 short chapters in 369 pages), or its clever and well-handled plot. But All Our Wrong Todays begins inauspiciously, and sets off many genre reading protocol alarm bells. A retro future that is not immediately ironic—that’s one thing. Barren is, at least at the outset, one of the most annoyingly pathetic protagonists I have ever encountered. He’s a dim bulb surrounded by luminosities, whose motivations are powered in large part by his manpain, which is generated by his own mediocrity as well as the the fridging of two—count ’em—two female characters. It does get better—Barren does learn better—but the book takes its time getting there, and it’s not necessarily pleasant or enjoyable until it does.
I’ve been thinking about the differences between genre and non-genre science fiction (of which this, like Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, is an example of the latter). One that came to mind during a recent sleepless and pain-filled night is subjectivity. A non-genre story will tend to focus more narrowly on its subject, and that subject’s inner life and personal growth, than a genre story might. It will be about people, rather than events or ideas, whereas a genre story, with its adventure-pulp traditions, might have different emphases: the point of saving the world, after all, is saving the world; character growth is a side effect. Which is to say that All Our Wrong Todays seems off-balance in these emphases to the point of profound solipsism. As we watch its self-absorbed protagonist struggle to become a better person as a result of radically changing the timeline, we might be struggling ourselves to give a shit.
I received an electronic review copy of this book via NetGalley.
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