Mastai Elan’s All Our Wrong Todays is a reflection of the present world that gives us a clue as to what the future should look like.David Leyes
A creeping doubt rises as we stare slack-jawed at tiny, glowing screens spitting nonsense; or sit knee-to-tray in overstuffed airplanes; or endure the endless red eyes of taillights in the grind of traffic … this is not the future we were promised.
Once upon a time, humankind dreamed of a better place. Flying cars, space vacations, and robot maids were the hallmarks of yesterday's world of tomorrow. And yet our modern lives are more Flintstones than Jetsons – we're still running on fossil fuels, sorely missing the jetpacks, underwater hotels, and supercities we expected.
We're living in the wrong future.
This indignant feeling periodically leaps to the forefront of the public consciousness – usually when the date is turning over to a nice round number (we're due for the next burst of outrage in 2020).
It's a sentiment that also happens to be the high concept behind Elan Mastai's debut novel All Our Wrong Todays.
In the novel, Tom Barren, a young man born and raised in the future we were supposed to have (i.e., the techno-utopia imagined in the 1960s), is dropped into our reality through a horrific time-travelling accident. In Tom's world, free limitless energy was discovered in 1965, instantly bequeathing to humankind all its technological dreams. Predictably, Tom finds our version of the future dreary and barbaric, the architecture unrefined and the food-pill selection severely lacking. That's not to mention what he doesn't find at all, including moon bases, disposable clothing and world peace.
These parallel realities provide a compelling backdrop for our not-altogether-likable protagonist to work out his issues with women, his father and with the different versions of himself he could (or already has) become. And what could have been a navel-gazing examination of self-doubt and mediocrity blossoms into a high-stakes sci-fi drama in which Tom tries to escape our brutish world to rejoin his spandex-clad companions in the future we all supposedly deserve.
The question is whether he really wants to go back.
It's a dilemma that is simplified because the novel treats Tom's retro-future as a bona fide paradise, using the optimistic predictions of yesteryear as a convenient pop-culture shorthand – a grinning caricature of the aspirations of the greatest generation.
But the world of tomorrow was never really a Utopia.
The most familiar aesthetics of our lost future (e.g., flying cars, domed cities, superhighways) often trace their roots back to the corporate-driven World's Fairs of the mid-20th century. In a typical exhibit called Futurama II at the 1964 New York World's Fair, General Motors predicted hordes of robotic tractors lasering through raw jungle as they built 20-lane freeways that laced between monolithic skyscrapers in the City of Tomorrow. Nothing fit a human scale, everything existed to serve corporate interests and human beings were reduced to faceless consumers.
These predictions were often bottom lines masquerading as Utopian futures.
Arriving in our present from an idealized future, Tom is soon seduced by the imperfections he finds. He discovers that our music is superior, its creation fuelled by strife. Punk rock and rock 'n' roll never happened in his world, thanks to the narcotizing effect of universal peace produced along with all the clean, free electricity.
It feels like a missed opportunity to explore a more realistic evolution of our whitewashed past.
The systemic sexism of the 1960s (not to mention all the other "-isms") seems to have disappeared without explanation in Tom's idyllic future. But without the social struggle of a women's liberation movement, I wonder how humankind could reach an age in which men and women are treated equally? How could free energy generate civil rights or LGBTQ rights or gender equality?
These social struggles, fought decade by decade, define the progress of human culture as much as our technological accomplishments, and arguably more.
In fact, past visions of the future are often fascinating not for the science, but because they tend to freeze the social mores of the time and project them into a modern setting – with predictions such as a "kitchen of the future" for women who were nowhere to be found by the time said future arrived (hint: they have careers).
All quibbles aside, the mechanics of this time-travelling adventure do lead to some fascinating insights.
When Tom lands in our timeline, he occupies the body of a parallel self who is subsumed by the new personality. Remembering this other person's life, Tom is shocked to find that in our world he has become an architect who borrows ideas from his dreams of an alternate reality and renders mundane versions of the sleek buildings of the future.
It's an authentic point to make – that the future lives in our imaginations.
Every product, every movie and every sci-fi novel is a reflection of the present world that gives us a clue as to what the future should look like – not only the future of our society, but also the future of the individual. We each carry in our imaginations a version of ourself that we would like to become, if only we could make that person real.
And this is where All Our Wrong Todays is at its strongest, as Tom considers (and sometimes interacts with) different versions of other people and himself, coming to understand that every new day represents a new opportunity to bring a better, more thoughtful, more heroic and happier version of himself closer to reality.
Leaping through time, Tom learns that we live in the echoes of our own minds – and the futures we spend time imagining are the ones we are most likely to get.
Daniel H. Wilson is the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse. He earned a PhD in robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His latest novel, The Clockwork Dynasty, will be published in August.