All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

Tom Barren lives in a ”Jetsons” world, where there are flying cars, abundant energy, unparalleled wealth, and equality between the sexes and the races. All that changed in 1965, when professor Lionel Goettreider discovered the secret of limitless free energy. He and all who observed the experiment died soon afterwards because of the radiation produced by the “Gottreider engine.” The radiation problem was easily fixed, and as Gottrieder gave up his invention to the public domain in his will, everything was changed everywhere. Tom Barren’s father is an inventor who is working on the time machine, is very focused on his work, and is not very interested in Tom. His mother was killed in an air-car accident. Tom is pretty neurotic and hasn’t really accomplished anything in his life. As he has little to do in his life, his father hires him to be part of the time-travel experiment. Due to some unfortunate circumstances and chance happenings, Tom is the one who travels back in time. As apparently everyone in the project is a moron, the destination of the first journey is the most important event in history: the test drive of the Gottreider engine. It was supposed to be impossible to influence past events, but it turns out that it is indeed possible. And the future is changed to our own very dystopian (in comparison) present. But not everything is bad: his mother is still alive and a happier person than she ever was; his father is nice and not an egomaniac; and he has a little sister who is smart and fun. Until that point, he himself has been something of a prick, though – but now he surprises his family by showing compassion towards them. And the woman he loves is still alive in this timestream and is also a better version of herself.

At first the book seemed irritating and slow-moving – it really took its time to really start. And there was a lot of repetition, even short chapters which were only a condensed version of what had happened until that point. There was some sort of very poor explanation for that, but it was unneeded and irritating anyway. Talking about irritating, the main character was very passive at the beginning of the story, irritating and even lethargic. After the time travel, he seemed to change; apparently, he was some sort of amalgamation of the personality traits of the person he was in the disappeared reality and the person he was in our reality, and he got the best parts of both of them. The end was a bit hurried, especially when compared to the first third of the book. A bit more detailed examination might have been a good idea. On the whole, it was a fairly good book.

400 pp.