[Book Review][Book Notes] All Our Wrong Todays

I haven’t read a lot of time travel science fiction in my life. So I can’t judge this book in the context of other sci-fi stories. But if this is what time travel books are supposed to be like, well done Elan Mastai! You’ve blown me away and won me as a reader for all your future work!

This book starts out as a time travel science fiction novel, but so very quickly, this gorgeously funny story with a narrator who’s just as confused as we readers are, becomes a strange look at everything else time travel is about – people, their emotions, their lives and arcs and how time travel affects them. The author wraps all of the stories he writes in a wry humor that had me laughing like a maniac on the bus, with amazed people looking at this loony who still reads hardbound books and laughs at them!

There are many layers of philosophy, anti-war, pro-peace rhetoric all set within the dialogue of the story for you to discover, with absolutely zero (well, two pages total) theoretical discussion. Every thought you’ve had about time travel, every plot point you can imagine while reading the story, every joke the author could fit in well, everything is in there.

This is a great read. It took me about three weeks of on-and-off reading and the story moves at a great pace, though it does get a little convoluted in the final chapters. But there too, is a gem – the author takes the universal concepts of time travel – it happens instantly, it can be reversed if done carefully, a second version of you can observe a third version of you in the background to fulfill some convoluted narrative – and twists and turns them to suit his excellent ideas.

Best of all is that this is a story about people. The narrator is so scientifically dense that he doesn’t bother to explain much about the technology he encounters. It’s a blast to see him blunder through life not knowing how doors works! But when it comes to people, oh, this is a deep story. It shows how amazingly, brilliantly, wholly selfish people are. If you’ve ever worshiped a ‘hero’, seeing them as a singular dimension of “all that is good”, this is the read to dispel your doubts!

I cannot describe how beautiful this book is. To do that would be, to take a phrase from the book, sort of like cracking a creme brulee. Just go read it. Borrow it from me if you want!

Notes on All Our Wrong Todays

Page 60, God this is a funny book! Every few pages, I’m grabbing my sides rocking with laughter! The people on the bus look at me like I’m crazy for laughing at a paper book.

Page 62, all this guy talks about is women!!! It’s like his entire life story is about one woman to the next! Damn!

Page 62, I’ve noticed something about modern futuristic sci-fi novels – they all tend to assume that somehow Chinese folks will be marrying Mexican folk a lot and the offspring will inevitably have a Chinese first and Spanish second name, or vice versa. I suppose that flows from the two largest non-white minorities that white writers focus on.

Page 66, this and the first line of the second chapter are the only two places where the narrator’s name is used till now. In chapter 2, because there, the author tries to be cheeky and uses the third person from the narrator’s perspective and immediately hates it and reverts back to first person, which is funny! This is what is so interesting to me about first person novels. The narrator has to be extremely descriptive about things and emotions and feelings, without which the novel starts to feel dull. In third person, there’s the escape from emotions and mainly a flow based on actions is easier to create.

Page 67, the narrator talks about a global time synced system, an NTP server at scale, but talks about it being synced to the microsecond. Is this an oversight? What about the nanosecond?

Page 73, here is the typical line from a man in the wrong, “I don’t think that justifies my subsequent actions. But it explains them.”

Page 76, the book talks about pregnancy and avoiding it and once again, even though all this marvelous technological advancement surrounds the narrator, the onus of making sure pregnancy is avoided lies with the woman, with what the author calls a ‘gametic suppressant’. Brilliant oversight. Of course, it’s a plot point. It’s just part of the story and crafted in a way to put the blame squarely on the unwitting narrator, but still.

Page 82, “the liar, the genius, the ghost.” What a line! Whey a way to describe, to summarize almost all genius!

Page 151, the narrator’s description of books and reading here is repeated from before. The way the narrator describes that his mother is the only one who reads paper books is also repeated.

Page 175, oh boy. The exact words the narrator has been hoping to hear his entire life.

Page 182, this chapter feels like an ode to a bookstore owner

Page 186, what a pretty line – “This is the morning after the night before.”

Page 186, there is a certain awkwardness in Penny’s language and lines. Almost as if the author wrote the character as such and fought with the editors about it. Let’s see, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this aspect of the character is important in some way.

Page 200, excellent ending to the chapter! Wonderful last line!

Page 203, spelling mistake. Should be imminently instead of immanently. I think. What does immanent mean? The internet seems to think ‘inherent’ or ‘remaining within’. I suppose that’s right. So, not a spelling mistake. A new word for me!

Page 208, just one perfect line and I burst out laughing in a crowded bus stand on a rainy day.

Page 214, heh. “small-d depressed”

Page 215, dawn often tends to smear across the sky, doesn’t it?

Page 223, “events in…a family…Extinction-level events”
What a wonderful way of looking at ‘issues’. Indeed, some families and relationships have major events that cause deep scars. One other book I’ve read this year also had similar ‘events’ – Before the Wind by Jim Lynch.

Page 224, “I don’t believe in the truth. I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now.”
That’s great writing. Such diametrically opposite statements!

Page 249, “even the unlovable parts you hadn’t shown him yet”
This is a very strong page. Read it all, but also this part alone. It’s so poignant because everyone has this feeling that they have dark parts that no one can love and even the ones who love them may never accept them. Ever. That is true human frailty.

Page 295, “Your brain is very good at managing cognitive dissonance. Arguably, it’s your brain’s main purpose.” ?

Page 319, this is not a sci-fi story about time travel. This is a love and loss story which happens to be wrapped in some convoluted sci-fi chapters. That’s beautiful!

Page 324, “This is how you discover who someone is. Not success. Not the result. The struggle.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about people and blogging and the social aspect of the open web. This line here shows why it’s so interesting to follow people’s blogs more than anything else – their social media profiles, their newsletters, their podcasts. Blogs are where people try and fail. Blogs are where people record their silliest mistakes and worst ideas. That journey is much more worth it than the result – a working product, or a service, or a life well lived.

Page 325, “That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.”
Beautiful words!

Page 357, “Its tough to get worked up about what might have been when all you know is what already is.”

Page 367, “It was like our collective imagination stopped revising the idea of what civilization could be, fixed a definitive model in place, and set to work making it happen.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – why do we have corruption, why do people know morals but don’t follow morals. After all, stagnation in politics and ethics is another kind of immorality. I think the author sums it up very nicely – when there is a fixed idea of what the world is supposed to be like, there can only be a sort of catching up to it. People don’t work to improve what they have or what they’re aiming for. They just want to get there and then hold on, without wondering whether the goal post has or should be moved.
This paragraph and this chapter is about the ideology the book is based on, or at least, a part of it. And it works well – it points out an inherent flaw in our thinking – when we accuse ideologues of misdirection and corruption, we don’t understand that even those who believe they are on a progressive path are in fact ideologues who are leading the world to a fixed point. Perhaps we need to check all our thought leaders and make sure they are constantly revising the end goal they are striving towards instead of limiting their vision to something lesser.

Intent

One of the bloggers I follow on the net, Chris Lovie-Tyler, recently moved from WordPress on his personal blog to a TinyLetter based newsletter on a new domain. Most of what he posts are poems and perhaps these poems are better suited on this new domain. As much as I hate newsletters (and podcasts), I followed him.

But that got me thinking – why do we follow people around?

Well, not physically. That’d be creepy. We follow a lot of people around online. Whenever you join a new social network (Facebook, twitter, Instagram), you follow a bunch of people. Slowly, you realize who posts good content and who doesn’t and you tweak that list based on your interests (in the case of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg personally edits your news feed to make it more boring).

Ok snarky, let’s stick to non-Facebook more-public social networks.

When you’re on Instagram, you see an interesting post, you open the person’s profile, you like some of their photos and then you follow them.

When you’re on twitter, you see an interesting tweet and, though you may or may not go check out the person’s older tweets, you follow them around.

But there’s a very small disconnect between these two activities – liking someone’s current content, and expecting their future content to be the same, or better, or interesting enough. You take on a risk when you follow someone online. They could be no more funny/interesting than you are, and then you’re stuck following someone who doesn’t inspire or interest you. They could be posting pics of their recent vacation, after which they’ll get back to posting pics of their lunches and their not-so-cute dog. They could have made an epic joke tweet, and use that spurt of popularity to start pushing a different agenda which you wholly disagree with (as is usually the case for meme accounts)!

All of that is possible. After all, most people lead ordinary lives. They aren’t constantly discovering new places or going on impromptu adventures. They work, eat, sleep, pretty much at the same places.

So why do we follow these people around? What is our intent in hitting that follow button?

Mind you, I’m excluding Facebook (and WhatsApp and if we were ten years ago, Orkut) because there, you know most of the people you follow. Even if you know them as acquantances, it’s still you following someone who you already know something about.

But why do we follow absolutely random strangers on the Internet? That too, based on one tweet, one post, one photo they’ve posted? We’ve often joked about it, but these social networks have indeed turned us into stalkers of the highest order. We peek into the lives of absolute strangers with no easy way to communicate with them meaningfully (likes and hearts are not communication, they’re a distraction). So it’s comfortable, easy, accepted to see something interesting and just hit follow. We’ll worry about the content later. Not following someone is kind of like not bookmarking an interesting article to read later. We never read it later, but we do get FOMO if we don’t bookmark it.

Coming back to it, I read Chris’ blog post about his move from the personal blog to the new domain. An hour later, I saw an email from him, inviting me to follow his journey on to the newsletter. Now, as I said, I don’t like newsletters. Gmail is not an ideal space for reading. Email is not geared towards enjoying good writing. It’s work. I thank Google for creating the concept of Promotions, Social, Updates and Forums sections. It tells me the things I need to care for and the things I do not need to care for. But as has been pointed out before, Gmail is killing blogs. There are so many ways outside of Gmail where one can follow people, so why do it inside it?

Yet, newsletters remain popular and one of the popular services to send newsletters – TinyLetter – doesn’t have RSS feed support. So I can’t follow Chris’ new adventure through my beloved RSS feed reader. But I want to follow Chris. I discovered Chris’ writing pretty much the same way we discover people on twitter or Instagram – one interesting post.

But then I went ahead and did something which we do not do on other social networks (remember, the open web is also a massive social network) – I went back in time and read every single one of Chris’ posts. Wait, no no, I worded that wrong. I went back to the beginning of Chris’ blog and read every single one of his posts. Lucky for me, it extended only to February 2018.

That’s when I decided that this person was worth following around. There is a massive difference between me and him – I’m not a poet, not a Christian, never been to NZ. But his words are beautiful and always strike a note in my mind. Here’s one of my favorite poems –

Sunday birds
————
My ears ring with the silence
of Sunday morning

Only the birds are up,
gently stirring the neighbourhood
to consciousness

This is the reason why I followed Chris’ blog – I liked all or most of his previous posts. That volume of past work assured me that I will like what this person puts out in the future too. This sort of freedom – to explore a person’s past work in its entirety without being pushed to follow them and move on – can only come from the Internet at large. After all, if I forget or close the tab or move on and want to come back later, my browser remembers every page I’ve looked at forever. This is not true for any of the silos we use – twitter doesn’t remind us which tweets we’ve looked at, Instagram doesn’t tell us the name of that one person who had that one vacation photo in Barcelona which we liked but never double tapped on.

There’s one more thing. I instantly felt this when I saw the email and actually asked Chris about this – his push to ask people to move to his newsletter was not some templated email blast to 500 followers. He had about 50 followers on WordPress.com Reader (which, I’ve come to learn recently, is an excellent RSS reader on its own, so if you never wanted to pay for RSS reading, just create a free account on WordPress.com folks) but knew that most of them are following him the same way people follow others on silo medias. No, that email went to a fraction of those and that fraction did the smart thing and subscribed to the newsletter.

I’ve meandered enough through this post. I just wanted to say that when you’re in a silo network, the push, the intent of following people is two-fold – as a user, you don’t want to miss out on future posts, and as a company, they want to show growth. But when you’re out on the open web – the intent in following someone is better – it’s about your personal connection with the person and their work. If you like it, you’ll follow them to the ends of the Earth. Otherwise, there’s that unsubscribe button. That’s why the open web is better.

A Zombie Story

I was born in a scientifically minded family. We used to have discussions based on logic and decisions based on fact. “Look at the facts!” my Mom used to tell me whenever I was being a wayward teenager. So, when we first heard the news, I sought out the facts. When I didn’t find any, I dismissed the news as noise. “Must be another version of the swine flu,” I remember thinking. Humans had taken the animal kingdom for granted for too long, and Nature had repaid in kind. First, things like the plague attacked humanity. Then, virii like HIV had their day in the Sun. When we got those under control, swine flu and other such infections invaded our food supply. Not that it mattered to me and my family. We were all vegetarians by choice. The only way this mad march of science and industry affected us was by GM foods. Of course, we had the choice to ignore those, since we were well-off and could afford to buy organic.
 
The first time I noticed this news in seriousness, it was when England went offline. The entire country had locked its doors and stopped talking to outsiders. No mail, no tweets, no radio signals of any kind. It bewildered people outside. The news talked about the ‘virus’ that had been ravaging animal and human populations in varying areas of the world. Speculation was rife that either the UK had decided that the threat outside was too much and they needed to protect themselves, or their own population was too far gone and they had sacrificed the remaining Brits to save the rest of the world from this calamity.
 
It still didn’t seem real, till the attacks started. Massive populations of infected people started attacking the uninfected. Violence erupted around the world almost simultaneously. It was as though the virus was building up an army before mobilizing it altogether. Gory images of cannibalistic crowds, attacking, murdering, killing, and most shocking of all, eating their victims filled the news. Gun sales shot through the roof. Doomsday preppers became mainstream. News broadcasts suddenly became the most watched shows around the world.
 
We saw the population dwindle. We saw chaos erupt. We saw our family die, our friends get devoured, our governments fall. The Internet was the only refuge, and it too sometimes flickered, because the virus was smart enough to understand how to rip through our communications lines. I say all this casually, but there’s no reason to not gloss over all that. It happened. We lived through it. That’s all there is to say about it.
 
We built up resources and went into hiding. We used natural and human-made defenses to ward off the zombies. We saw the worst of humanity play games with the survivors and do ghastly experiments on the undead. They saw them as nothing more than animals of the most violent nature, and they treated them as such. I didn’t care either way. I survived because I saw them as nothing more than carriers of death. When I saw a fast-moving one, I killed it. When I saw a slow-moving one, I used to kill it if it got too close. Then I stopped killing the slow ones if I was going away from it, or if it was too slow to catch up to me. I had to preserve ammo after all. The last few years, we’d been making our own ammo and metal was difficult to come by. There was no one mining, smelting, refining or even recycling. Metal workers were well-protected, as much as farmers, and their ‘lords’ charged heavily for access. They all eyed a free-agent like me with suspicion and many often didn’t let me into their holds.
 
So I traveled from place to place and found work, refuge, metal, and food how ever I could. Between holds was the most dangerous areas, especially when I traveled alone. This was one such day. The Sun was bright overhead and made any open movement impossible, as it would attract too much attention from the zombies. I was passing through a city that was almost all dead. It had two zones of humans at its ends, and passing goods between them was risky work that gave good pay. I had a backpack full of wares which people had paid me in food and metal to transport, but there was never any assurance of delivery. I moved from building to building till I hit a cross-street that was too wide to cross in the light. I decided to settle in till nightfall. I checked the perimeter, secured doors and marked escape routes. I noticed two zombies in the vicinity. One was immobile and the other was inching around. The rigid one was redead, a gaping hole in its head marking the place where someone had shot it up to destroy its brain. Dark puss was oozing out of the wound. It was a recent kill. The other one was its mate. It lingered close to the body. Why someone would spare it, I didn’t know. I looked at it for a while from the shadows and it didn’t register my presence. It just kept trying to move its buddy, like a bunch of wounded soldiers. Its movements were too slow to reach me in the next few hours, I decided. Going back in, I settled into a dark corner in a room with two exits, gun in hand. A single bullet in the chamber was both my defense and my insurance. I didn’t want to be empty-handed if attacked, and I didn’t want to kill someone in a fit of anger or fear.
 
I must have dozed off for longer than I wanted to. There was no sunlight outside. I flicked on a solar-powered flashlight and yawned. I had perhaps lost an hour or two, but it didn’t matter. There were only a few dangerous areas in the city according to my maps, and I knew I could cross them all in a matter of hours. As I lay there, lazily stretching, I felt a presence. I swung the light around at the first entrance. There was nothing there. Dreading what I’d see there, I swung it to the other side. The slowbie I’d seen outside was almost at my feet. I scrambled up and aimed my gun at it in frustration. I was about to shoot it when it looked right in my eyes. We knew they couldn’t see very well in the night. Their bodies, having degenerated to an extent, had night blindness of varying degrees. I didn’t know what this one could see. I moved my flashlight from left to right. It’s eyes didn’t follow. Perhaps it was completely blind and was here only by instinct or following noise. Snorers died quickly in the open lands. I didn’t want to waste the bullet, or make too much noise killing this thing. I had so far avoided ever killing one of these things at close quarters, using a knife or such tools. I’m no sadist and I was not interested in risking my life over some hand-work.
 
It stared at me oddly without moving an inch for the five minutes I stood there. Finally, I had to move on. I could have just walked out the other door, but an instinct told me to rekill this thing. I approached it, gun trained on the head. My flashlight beamed on the grey skull. As I settled on a good place to shoot it, it looked up. Was it smiling? It seemed to be looking at something beyond and smiling. I knew I had been had. I swung around the entire half arc it took me to turn back and face upwards. But before I knew what I would find, a creature jumped down from the ceiling and landed on my torso. It pushed me down and scattered the gun to the corner. Blinded by its rapid movements and struggle to overpower me, I tried hard to push it away. The torch was still in my hands, but it wasn’t much of a weapon. I couldn’t use it anyways, because the creature had me pinned down. I could feel its rapid cold breath close to me. It didn’t need the extra oxygen it was breathing, but some anatomical features were difficult for the zombies to let go of. So it struggled to bite me and I struggled to get free. The moment I found its hand moving away from my arm, to press my head down, I swung the torch at its head. The blow was soft, but startled it enough for me to throw it to the other side of the room and get up.
 
But this was no ordinary zombie. Instead of needing a moment to recover, it was rushing at me again. I tried to move to the side, but all I was able to do is get my face in the way of its flailing arm, which knocked hard against my head and threw me off-balance. It found this new tool rather effective, and pushed me down, then pressed my mouth hard with its arm. I was gasping for breath and this told it that I was losing the battle.
 
Now, I’m a logical person. I know what is and isn’t and what can be and can’t be done. I had never faced a zombie this fast. I had never seen them coordinate. I had never seen one scale the smooth walls of a room and somehow attach itself to the roof to lie in wait for a distracted human. I had also never felt, through my teeth, the dirty cloth worn by a zombie and the sinewy arm it covered. I felt the bone pressing down on my teeth, perhaps trying to shatter them. I did the most illogical thing I could think of, the only way that seemed out of this absurd situation I had gotten myself into. I opened my mouth ever so slightly and let the arm lodge itself into it. Then I bit. I didn’t know what would happen. Zombies don’t exactly feel pain at the limb level. Their brains do not receive signals from their nervous systems. I had seen countless zombies trudging along without an arm or a leg, or sometimes pretty much any limb, just crawling like vile slugs.
 
Yet, I bit in. I had hoped for an element of surprise, and then freeing myself and running away. Perhaps I had not hoped for that either. Perhaps it was my last stand. Perhaps I did not open my mouth consciously, but the arm forced it open with sheer pressure. But I found its arm in my mouth, sticking to my tongue and soaking my saliva, and I bit hard.
 
It yelped in pain and fell backwards. As it did, it yanked its arm away, but my bite was too strong and I ripped off part of its dead skin as it pulled away. The cloth and skin still in my mouth, I got up to see the thing writhing in pain on the floor. Even fire did not produce this effect on zombies. It was in excruciating pain. My flashlight naturally fell on it and I saw what could only be the most absurd thing I’ve seen in my entire life. The zombie turned back. It slowly went from blue, dead, and decaying, to reddish, alive, though barely, and very much in pain. It was shrieking, till he was not. He was a boy, of barely 16, badly nourished, holding his arm, the one I’d bitten away at. He looked around, dazed. He sat up, and I jumped back. In response, he jumped back in his seat. He was as afraid of me, as I was of him. But he was human. I knew this, because suddenly, the zombie on the other side of the room was not looking at me with a greedy hunger, but at the boy. It smelled the younger flesh, it recognized the wound filling the room with the scent of sweet blood. It slowly turned away from me and started its slow ambling towards its new goal. I shot it. One ringing bullet reverberated through the room and one clean hole appeared in its skull. It fell, redead.
 
The boy jumped up when I shot the zombie and rushed to the corner of the room. I beamed a light at his face. It had genuine fear on it. He was on the verge of crying, but he recovered, only to look at me and my gun, now trained at him. “What is going on?” he asked. I almost laughed. The last thing I expected to see in this desolate inner city was a re-alive human. When I didn’t answer, he looked around and noticed his arm. He winced when he saw the bite mark. At some point, I had spit his skin away. I pulled my backpack and took out a bandage. I wavered about what to do with the gun, then pushed it back into its holster and shone a light on the bandage and then tossed it towards him. He caught it mid-air, but fumbled it a little. When he’d caught it and applied it, I took some food out of pack and threw it at him. He tore at it hungrily. Zombies never eat human food, no matter how artificial and how processed. The only thing they eat is flesh. For a long time, scientists tried to explain it as some extreme form of cannibalism. But the closer they came to explaining it, the more violent their test subjects became, eventually killing off every scientist who was willing to study zombies. It was as if the zombies knew their secrets were being unraveled and wanted to prevent it. When he had eaten, I asked him where he was from, what he remembered last, and what he thought was going on. But all he drew was a blank. There was very little the boy understood. His slate had been wiped almost clean.
 
I didn’t know where to go from here. Had I discovered some amazing secret of how to destroy zombies? Or was this the worst fluke in the history of the earth? Before I could ask myself these questions, a light flickered in front of my eyes. It was as if it was a part of my eyesight itself. Words started appearing in front of me, hung in the air somehow. They shone brightly in the darkness of the room.
 
“You have discovered the secret.”
 
“This is the only way to destroy the zombies.”
 
“Now you will die.”
 
As soon as the last words disappeared, I heard a rumbling sound from outside. I ran to the door of the building and peeked. I saw what seemed like a horde of zombies marching down the street. They were pouring out from every building, every gutter, and every hole. They shone like dull ants in the pale light of the moon. But they were not the regular undead. They had a purpose. They marched in lockstep. They seemed to be looking for something. They seemed to be looking straight at me. I rushed back inside, half expecting the boy to have turned back into a zombie. I was relieved that he had not. I took out a spare gun and shoved it into his hand.
 
“You know how to use this?”
 
I didn’t wait for an answer. I pulled him by his good arm and rushed out the back. I knew the city’s layout. I had memorized every block before this expedition. We had to rush to the nearer hold. It was a good half mile away. That was the longest half mile of my life.
This story was inspired by the following Writing Prompt as well as some of my favorite recent writing –

At some point in my life, I told myself that zombie stories are silly and not worth reading/watching/writing. But this prompt was just sublime. It spurred me towards creativity like none other has. So I wrote it up. I hope you enjoyed it.

Update – the writing prompts page I follow has deleted all their prompts so you can’t see the prompt. I’ve forgotten the exact words, but it was along the lines of “you’re about to die at the hands of a zombie and as a last-ditch effort, you bite into it and it turns into a human” 😀