All Our Wrong Todays

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Published: 2017
Narrated by: Elan Mastai
Length: 10:02 (373 pages)

This is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Elan Mastai, a science-fiction story about a man who lives in a different 2016, one with all of the technological advances we grew up dreaming about – flying cars, medical advancements, food replicators, and, my personal favourite, the ability to wake up refreshed with no grogginess. In this alternate 2016, they have also just discovered a way to solve the puzzle of time travel.

This will contain some minor spoilers.

While travelling back in time, a terrible mistake is made, and the traveller returns to 2016 to find his technological paradise replaced with the world we have now. We’re his dystopia. At least, it appears that way at first. He has to adjust to this alternative life while hopefully finding a way to restore his timeline.

Time travel is always a tricky thing to write. It’s so easy to end up with glaring holes that take you out of the story, but I really loved how Mastai handled it in this. He brings up the point that time travel doesn’t just require a shift in time but also a shift through space. Even if you could travel back in time thirty years, you’d just find yourself floating in empty space, since the planet is continuously rotating and orbiting the sun. They handle this by tracing a specific type of radiation left from an event in the past. This allows them to know not only how much time has passed since the event occurred, but also where in space the event took place.

It’s not a new thought, but he solves it in a way that I thought was quite interesting. In time travel stories, you basically just need to make the explanation believable enough to not jar the reader, and he did a great job of that here.

What I really didn’t like is that the main focus of the plot is an incredibly flimsy love story. In his original 2016, he works alongside a woman who barely acknowledges his existence for almost their entire time together. They hook up at the last minute, and he falls in love with her before travelling back in time. It seemed more of a nervous fling than anything, I thought, but later he decides that it’s the truest of love. In our 2016 he meets the same(ish) woman and they are inexplicably bound together at first sight. He barely knew her in his own time, and it felt like she didn’t even really like him much. I get what Mastai was trying for – a love so strong that two people can be tied together throughout the space-time continuum – but it was just so contrived and idiotic. Almost everything for the main character revolved around sex, and it just seemed a very dull and adolescent way to push along the plot.

I find it annoying because the premise is really interesting. You can see the potential of what this could have been, but then it turns into a shallow love story that follows a time-travelling horndog. It’s the novel equivalent of an expensive steak drenched in ketchup. You can scrap most of it away and still enjoy it on some level, but come on.

Elan Mastai did his own narration for the audiobook. I didn’t notice that when I bought it and would probably have avoided the audio edition if I had, as self-narration is almost always a disaster, but he actually did a brilliant job. It reminded me a bit of Wil Wheaton’s narration style, which has really grown on me over the years.

I did still enjoy this overall, but it could have been so much more. I have a feeling this will eventually become a romantic comedy. Elan Mastai is a screenwriter and this feels ripe for a film adaptation. Maybe they’ll develop the initial relationship a bit more for the movie version.