All Our Wrong Todays

One of the benefits of being kind to librarians is the occasional advanced proof of a book that feels written just for you.  Sometimes, as is the case with Elan Mastai’s wonderful All Our Wrong Todays, these advanced copies even include a short note beginning with “Dear Librarian,” which makes even the Dystopian Movie Society feel intellectual and savvy.

Don’t you love this guy already?

Mastai’s stunning first novel is a break from his day job, writing movies.  No wonder we here at the DMS fell in love.  The main character, whose name I shall not print here for reasons that will become apparent if and when you purchase and read this book, is kind of a dick.  Naturally, we can all relate to him.

The narrative begins in a utopian society, fueled quite literally by the invention of a device that harnesses the rotation of the Earth to generate unlimited clean energy.  Because the inventor dies shortly after his proof of concept, he makes this technology free and open to everyone.  Maybe we have watched too many films of a certain genre, or maybe we know too many human beings, but the DMS is deeply skeptical of the idea that unlimited clean energy would lead to the utopia described at the beginning of Mastai’s brilliant story.

The utopia readers see at the start of the book, however, is a prelude to the time travel narrative in which our protagonist becomes the first time-traveler, accidentally creates our reality as a dystopian alternate timeline, discovers the concept of temporal drag, and maybe loses his mind.  It is phenomenal.  Of the many differences noted between the teased utopia and our own world, my favorite was Kurt Vonnegut.

As the main character tells it, “Vonnegut’s writing is different where I come from.  Here, despite his wit and insight, you get the impression he felt a novelist could have no real effect on the world.  He was compelled to write, but with little faith that writing might change anything. . . . [I]n my world Vonnegut was considered among the most significant philosophers of the late twentieth century.  This was probably great for Vonnegut personally but less so for his novels, which became increasingly homiletic.”

So it goes.

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If you enjoyed Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, you will love All Our Wrong Todays.  Both deftly navigate the narrative pitfalls of branching alternate realities while somehow making the personal relationships explored in each book more important than their time travel plots.

Pre-order All Our Wrong Todays before we run out of tomorrows.  Excerpts of the book, ready for public consumption on February 7, 2017, may be read here and here.  Support great literature by buying this wonderful read here.

The Girl With All the Gifts

It is a fair bet that any film described by critic Jay Weissberg as “[a] tired attempt to board the zombie bandwagon . . . ” can happily hitch a ride with us.  Sure, the film is a bit heavy handed at times, but maybe every fucking person in the United States should be slapped around a little bit.  We loved the film, based on the book by M. R. Carey, and look forward to its release in North America.

Our favorite character is Melanie, a young black girl growing up in prison.  If it is not thought provoking to see a group of heavily armed, mostly white people so terrified of a petite black girl that they keep her in Hannibal Lecter style restraints for most of the movie, then you probably live in South Dakota and think racism is something the Texas School Board of Education includes in children’s history books as a footnote somewhere near the hills of Georgia.

 

How the fuck can bullets be soft?

The narrative, and sometimes feel, of this movie draw favorable comparisons to The Last of Us, which finally convinced a lot of parents to throw in the towel and decide that video games might possibly be capable of artistic achievement.  Both build on the not implausible idea that a fungus could give humankind a run for its money.  We have not put up much of a showing lately, and, as it turns out, fungi have been carrying a lot more weight than we thought.  The Girl With All the Gifts also shares some commonalities with one of Warren Ellis’s better recent comics, Trees, which is worth picking up at your local comic book shop.

The pacing is sometimes slow, following Melanie’s still-sharp mind as she attempts to make her way in the only world she has ever known.  Rather than detract from the film, it evokes the same feelings this viewer had watching children dancing under sunlight in David Gordon Green’s George Washington.   What Melanie realizes is that the “end of the world” just means “the end of humanity as we know it.”  Frankly, that might be a welcome development.

As we recall, we have been promised that the world will never again be destroyed by flood.  We do not remember any such promise with respect to fungi.

By the way, those zombies are what you look like visiting Times Square.  Except the zombies move a lot faster and seem to have a goal in mind.