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. (Feb.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. Mastai has fun with all the usual conventions of time travel and its many paradoxes, and the cherry on top is his dialogue, reminiscent of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

From here, the story takes several startling turns as Tom tries to make things right by using another time machine to change the future of this timeline. In order to prove to her where he is really from, Tom is forced to track down the scientist who invented the clean-energy device. Horrified at what he sees, Tom tries to come to terms with his new environment, which is only made bearable by a bookstore owner named Penny, with whom he promptly falls in love. He disappears, and when he rematerializes he is in an alternate timeline, socially and technologically backward-in other words, our own 2016. Unfortunately, Tom’s presence causes the experiment to go haywire. Thanks to an experimental time machine, Tom travels back to the moment this glorious future was born-the 1965 invention of the Goettreider Engine, a clean-energy source that transformed mankind. There are flying cars, robot maids, jet packs, teleportation, ray guns, and space vacations. In Mastai’s imaginative debut novel, Tom Barren’s version of 2016 is a technological utopia based on a model popularized by 1950s science fiction.

All our wrong todays by elan mastai