In his old world, intelligent machine servants and hover cars are ubiquitous. He claims to hail from an extraordinary alternate reality in which technological advancement far surpasses our own.

At the beginning of the “memoir,” Tom Barren introduces himself. It ties these themes to the familiar modern struggle of the individual to find his correct time and place in a shifting and unreliable world.

The novel falls into the postmodern genre for its involvement of many metaphors from quantum physics, including the metaphor of parallel universes. Tom vacillates between the present and past tense without establishing clear chronological guideposts, suggesting that he is still split between different realities and that these realities occasionally converge. While repeatedly apologizing for his self-perceived inability to write a “good” report of his life, he attempts to explain how he was stranded in his readers’ ordinary universe. Nonetheless, I felt compelled enough to stick with it until the end, much in the same way as I've felt compelled in the past to keep watching any of a number of cheesy science fiction films I happened up flipping through late night television.All Our Wrong Todays, a speculative novel by Elan Mastai, is told from the perspective of Tom Barren, an unreliable narrator who claims to be a time-traveler from an alternate universe who is trying to write his memoir. Even Lionel Goettreider, the man who made The Future possible, is more a caricature than a character (view spoiler). None of the other characters are especially three dimensional either. Worse, there is no particularly satisfying character arc for any version of the main character. This perhaps could have been rescued if the narrator grew in perspective and insight as the narrative unfolded, but it never happens. The idea that unlimited energy would somehow magically result in a utopia is frankly risible it feels like the juvenile fantasy of an unimaginative mind. The alternate future it envisions is hollow and uninteresting, and the author spends virtually no time in explaining how it came about.

The premise had promise, and some of the ideas were interesting enough, but it was not very well conceived or constructed. Maybe a two and a half? I won't say I regret reading this, exactly, or that I was bored by it, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

All our wrong todays by elan mastai