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All of Our Wrong Todays: A Novel by Elan Mastai
Published in February of 2017.
“...you know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we’d have? Flying cars, robot maids, food pills, teleportation, jet packs, moving sidewalks, ray guns, hover boards, space vacations, and moon bases. All that dazzling, transformative technology our grandparents were certain was right around the corner. The stuff of world’s fairs and pulp science-fiction magazines with titles like Fantastic Future Tales and The Amazing World of Tomorrow. Can you picture it? Well, it happened."
From page 1 of All Our Wrong Todays.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Peter Thiel
All of Our Wrong Todays is a novel in a hurry. No time is wasted in bringing us to a modern day of the future of our 1950s dreams. And then, just as we are getting comfortable in a world where scarcity has been placed on the dustbin of history, everything comes undone.
The first-time novelist Elan Mastai is an accomplished screenwriter - a skill that translates well in this cinematic reinterpretation of the classic time travel tale. Fans of novels about the future will enjoy this particular take on what life might have been like if we got unlimited energy rather than Twitter.
For our purposes, I’d like to use All Our Wrong Todays to imagine how our world might indeed look different if a Goettreider Engine - the source for unlimited power in the novel - were to be invented today.
How would our world change if power was as free and abundant?
In All of Our Wrong Todays, the future (or present, as the novel starts in the present day - unlimited power being discovered in 1965) is a techno-utopia that rests on the foundation of free energy. Poverty has been consigned to a museum exhibit. Absent competition for scarce resources, geopolitical conflict has been reduced to friendly diplomatic agreements. Work has been divorced from income, or material want, leaving almost everyone to spend their days pursuing artistic pursuits. Our current carbon based economy has been replaced by one where corporations strive to deliver ever higher levels of entertainment value.
Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine a technological revolution that would result in free and abundant energy?
We may not get Goettreider Engine - a technology that relies on the rotation of the earth and the movement of the planets to produce energy - but we could plausibly get something else. An exponential breakthrough in solar cells and batteries could, in theory, eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels. Hydrogen cells are another possibility. One need not believe in cold fusion to imagine a future where renewable power and advanced electrical storage meets all of our energy needs.
Would free and abundant energy lead to the techno-utopia imagined in All Our Wrong Todays?
Just how close is the link between poverty and inequality with energy scarcity?
How might we answer this question at the level of the college campus? What would happen if your campus power plant was suddenly able to produce the power necessary to run all of your buildings and machines at zero cost? Would that new ability solve the postsecondary cost disease?
This is the sort of thought experiment that I think worthwhile of consideration amongst our higher ed community. Where do our scarcities originate, and what sort of technologies might ameliorate them?
We are so locked into the model of permanent scarcity within higher education that it may take a novel about the impact of unlimited energy (and the dangers of time travel) to shake us out of current mental models.
Can we imagine any technology that might solve our higher ed challenges, much less one that might address the larger world beyond our gates?
What are your favorite time travel novels?
What are you reading?
