Mastai, Elan
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Canadian screenwriter and author, best known in the former capacity for scripting a romantic comedy, The F Word (2013) directed by Michael Dowse. His first novel, All Our Wrong Todays (2017), describes two Alternate History versions of recent history, one being our default world, which is here depicted as profoundly Dystopian for a range of reasons, including Climate Change caused by uncontrollable use of energy. The other world is a Utopia built along lines consistent – as Mastai makes explicit – with the 1950s SF Megatext: radiantly clean cities, various forms of "futuristic" Transportation, Teleportation and, eventually, Time Travel. This utopia has been made possible when the Invention of the Goettreider Engine in 1965 which provides free unlimited energy, the elimination of scarcity being a compelling Jonbar Point for a fissuring of worlds. There are family romance elements in the plot, in which the young protagonist, whose malfunctioning Time Machine has dumped him into the chaos of our default world; the story is additionally recomplicated through his inadvertently causing the original 1965 engine to malfunction, creating more world-lines. [JC]
Elan Mastai
born Vancouver, British Columbia
works
- All Our Wrong Todays (Toronto, Ontario: Doubleday Canada, 2017) [hb/Christopher Lin and Zak Tebbal]
links
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