That said, there are moments in which Mastai offers metaphors or insights significantly more sophisticated than the chatty tone in which the novel is narrated. It also becomes increasingly difficult to disagree with the sentiment. This refrain is repeated so often it’s hard not to see it as a manifestation of the author’s own anxiety. Tom frequently apologizes for his clumsy narration he explains that he’s never written a book before, and probably isn’t doing it right. Mastai’s prose style is loose and open, and especially in the early chapters it feels like he is writing at, rather than to, the reader. Mastai goes to some dark places before finally allowing Tom to achieve real self-awareness, and in both timelines, it is women – especially Penelope/Penny (a tragic hero and object of his lust in one timeline, his down-to-earth partner in the other) – who most often pay the price for Tom’s personal growth. Mastai effectively uses Tom’s nostalgia to critique both representations of the world in the novel, especially with regard to gender issues, but he takes a long time getting there, and risks losing readers along the way.

Tom’s mother, meanwhile, obviates her own personhood in favour of servitude to her oblivious, genius husband.

He is a jerk to women, including the most capable character in the book, who becomes pregnant, but loses her job (and her life) when her situation is blamed on her recklessness.

He spends much of the book lamenting the loss of that ideal world, but many of his stories also focus on his less-than-progressive social attitudes. Tom doesn’t just believe science and technology can save humanity: he knows it already has, in another, better iteration of the present. True to its 1950s and ’60s sci-fi inspiration, All Our Wrong Todays leans heavily on both social nostalgia and techno-determinist optimism.

Readers will recognize this latter setting as the world we actually live in. Narrator Tom Barren has grown up as a shiftless underachiever in a Jetsons-inspired techno-utopia of flying cars and food pills, but a time-travel accident erases his world from existence and replaces it with a grungy, dystopian nightmare version of 2016 beset by poverty, ecological disaster, and war. The premise of screenwriter Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays is almost perversely appropriate for our present moment.

All our wrong todays