Elan Mastai: "Time travel is a very human thing"

2016 was the kind of year that made you desperately wish time travel was a real thing. Basically just a mass of celebrity deaths, geopolitical disasters and assassinated gorillas named Harambe crushed into something vaguely resembling a calendar, its complete awfulness has inspired a recent wave of sci-fi stories that ponder the possibility of a cosmic rewind button. In his debut novel All Our Wrong Todays, the acclaimed Canadian screenwriter Elan Mastai (What If, Fury) takes this idea a step further by beginning with the basic premise that our world is itself the result of a temporal adventure gone wrong, an accidental dystopia that was never meant to be. For even the most optimistic observer of current affairs, it’s an idea that seems, well, timely.

“It was very strange,” Mastai claims when asked about his novel’s unfortunate accuracy, “these big, destabilising events that were happening felt perfectly in line with what I was writing about. It’s disturbing when you find politics catching up with this type of novel. That sense of waking up in a world where the rules have changed, it feels full of anxiety and dread, and you’re not sure how you got here…”

The zeitgeist of the last few years in a nutshell, basically, which gives time travel a pretty powerful appeal, as Mastai explains: “The idea of time travel is a very human thing, the idea of a second chance where we can do it again, do better. Especially when you have these huge, disorientating shifts in politics, there’s the feeling that if we could just go back and fix it everybody would be a lot happier.” Just one person, going back in time to be like “Hey, maybe the person who gets the most votes should be the winner” or “Hey, maybe things that are written on the side of buses aren’t always true.”

Time travel is a narrative device which can unlock all kinds of philosophical, emotional and stylistic possibilities, by bending the most basic rules of how a story is told, but when handled badly it can also explode spectacularly, obliterating the suspension of disbelief and sending the audience’s emotional investment straight up in flames. Going in, Mastai had a very clear idea of what sort of time travel he intended to write and what sort he definitely didn’t, beginning with the logistics of time travel itself. 

“I like it when they take the science seriously. Obviously any story involving time travel is going to be highly theoretical and kind of fantastical but you can take it seriously enough to give it the texture of reality.” A key example in his own work is the problem of ‘where’ in a form of travel based around ‘when’ – given that the earth itself is in constant motion, if a person were to travel back in time to the exact same physical location they would most likely find themselves floating in the dark abyss of empty space (and then they would find themselves very dead). It’s the little details like these which keep All Our Wrong Todays' flights of fantasy grounded in reality.

The book wanders off into these sorts of scientific and philosophical wonderings at fairly regular intervals, but always does so firmly from the point of view of its lead character Tom. This brings its experiments with the space time continuum back down to human scale, framed continuously by one average guy’s experience. Having achieved great success as a screenwriter, Mastai attributes this desire to tell the story from inside his narrator’s mind as a prime motivation for his decision to switch medium. “I wanted to access the interior thoughts of this character, so I wanted to use the first person. The tone is his voice, it’s the thing that brings the reader into the story.” Alongside the attention it pays to the science of its world, it’s this personal quality which keeps All Our Wrong Todays anchored in reality even as its plot spirals out into parallel timelines and hi-tech utopias.

“I guess what I don’t like is time travel stories that treat it as if it’s very clean.” Mastai explains, “You just go back, make a slightly different decision and there won’t be any unintended consequences. Why shouldn’t time travel be the hardest thing you ever experience? I like time travel stories where the emotional and psychological implications are powerful.” One of the things that makes All Our Wrong Todays so mind-meltingly compelling is how messy things get when chronic underachiever Tom tries to go back in time to alter a single event, only to trip and knock over half of reality. His struggle to reconcile the world lost with the one he finds himself in, and carry the weight of everyone who now exists and everyone who now doesn’t on his conscience, is the source of the book's emotional power.

In a novel glowing with glittering futuristic invention, this element comes straight from Mastai’s own reality.  “Like my narrator Tom, I lost my mom. It happened to me when I was in my twenties and it was quite sudden. Going through the grief of the loss with my family was an intense and difficult time, I don’t think that I even realised the extent to which my life would turn and go in a different direction at that moment.” That longing for time we can’t get back is universally relatable and acts as the heart of Mastai’s novel, keeping it intimately understandable throughout. “If I could time travel, I don’t know that I’d change anything, but I would go back and spend time with my mom and with the version of my family that ceased to exist when we lost her.”

The novel has the same easy flow as Mastai’s previous work for the screen, matching 2013’s Daniel Radcliffe and Zoey Kazan-starring What If for the snap of its dialogue in a way that makes its imperfect characters immediately likeable and gives their pain a true gut-punch quality. Moving from the big screen to the pages of a novel, the skills he honed working on the former prove vital to the success of his new work. “There were definitely times when I said to myself 'OK, now I’m going to deploy my skillset as a screenwriter, now I’m going to make sure this scene is very visually dynamic, very kinetic, very propulsive.'” Mastai says, “There are some very cerebral or philosophical or emotional parts of the book where I muse on certain things or the characters analyse their own emotional state, so when I have chapters like that I felt like it’s my job as a writer to reward the reader by kicking up the action with a very cinematic scene.”

The result is a novel that reads with the pace and flair of a Hollywood flick without sacrificing the sense that the bodies being flung through space and time are real people. It can slow down to ruminate on a particular moment or fire off into a nerve-jangling action scene, telling a story that remains intimately human even as it rockets off into dazzling futurescapes and metaphysical paradoxes.