isbn-13: 9781101985137
Audible
I’m a sucker for time-travel books and this is one of two great time-travel books I’ve read this year - the other being A Gift of Time. Both of them take some effort to think through (in their own ways) some of the practical questions around time travel - e.g. do your clothes travel with you? what if you materialize into a solid object? etc.
All Our Wrong Todays is the jokier of the two, but has its more profound moments too. I was particularly intrigued by the author’s reference to French philosopher Paul Virilio’s idea of the “integral accident”.
A quote from the book:
Cat’s Cradle is about a lot of things, but a major plot thread involves the invention of ice-nine, a substance that freezes everything it touches, which falls out of its creator’s control and destroys all life on the planet.
Lionel Goettreider read Cat’s Cradle and had a crucial realization, what he called the “Accident”— when you invent a new technology, you also invent the accident of that technology.
When you invent the car, you also invent the car accident. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash. When you invent nuclear fission, you also invent the nuclear meltdown. When you invent ice-nine, you also invent unintentionally freezing the planet solid.
When Lionel Goettreider invented the Goettreider Engine, he knew he couldn’t turn it on until he figured out its accident—and how to prevent it.
Publisher’s Description: “There’s no such thing as the life you’re”supposed” to have… You know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we’d have? Well, it happened. In Tom Barren’s 2016, humanity thrives in a techno-utopian paradise of flying cars, moving sidewalks, and moon bases, where avocados never go bad and punk rock never existed . . . because it wasn’t necessary. Except Tom just can’t seem to find his place in this dazzling, idealistic world, and that’s before his life gets turned upside down. Utterly blindsided by an accident of fate, Tom makes a rash decision that drastically changes not only his own life but the very fabric of the universe itself. In a time-travel mishap, Tom finds himself stranded in our 2016, what we think of as the real world. For Tom, our normal reality seems like a dystopian wasteland. But when he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and–maybe, just maybe–his soul mate, Tom has a decision to make. Does he fix the flow of history, bringing his utopian universe back into existence, or does he try to forge a new life in our messy, unpredictable reality? Tom’s search for the answer takes him across countries, continents, and timelines in a quest to figure out, finally, who he really is and what his future–our future–is supposed to be. All Our Wrong Todays is about the versions of ourselves that we shed and grow into over time. It is a story of friendship and family, of unexpected journeys and alternate paths, and of love in its multitude of forms. Filled with humor and heart, and saturated with insight and intelligence and a mind-bending talent for invention, this novel signals the arrival of a major talent.”