"This is not, I am sad to say, a manual on how to build a time machine," said Elan Mastai, speaking of his novel All Our Wrong Todays—a winning slapsticky, SF-tinged love story about Tom, a semi-hapless hero who uses his father's experimental time machine to travel back and forth in time from the present to the 1965, putting at risk all he loves. PW's review praised the book as "imaginative" and said it was reminiscent of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

"Really, what I was aiming for was more Kurt Vonnegut crossed with Jonathan Tropper," jokes Mastai while sitting in a coffee shop near his house in Toronto. Mastai grew up in Vancouver, the child of a mother from Chicago and a father from Marrakech, and spent years in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, so he's comfortable displaying his confidence.

Mastai's top Hollywood credit is for penning the 2014 award-winning film "What If," which starred Daniel Radcliffe. Asked about transitioning to writing fiction, he replies that the idea for "All Our Wrong Todays" started life as a screenplay. "But I quickly realized I wouldn't be able to tell the story I wanted the way I wanted to in a script—it was too big, too expansive, and filled with too many ideas," he says. "Then it occurred to me: a novel."

Mastai brought the dramatic skills he developed in his Hollywood career to bear on the writing of the book: it's a fun, entertaining and zippy read with big plot twists and big character reveals. It impressed Maya Ziv at Dutton so much that she preempted the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2015 for a sum estimated to be in excess of $1.25 million. And the bet that it will have broad appeal is paying off: the book is at the top of the IndieNext list for February and, unsurprisingly, has already been optioned to be filmed.

Part of the attraction of the All Our Wrong Todays lies in its vision of a techno-utopian world right out of the 1960s. "My grandfather was a chemist by trade and he was a big science fiction fan and he had this big collection of classic novels—Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham, anthologies of Analog and Galaxy. As a kid, I would go through pulling them off the shelf, starting at the garish covers with the square-jawed astronauts and buxom scientists. The earliest inspiration for the book came from this one that had a vast high way system with flying cars on the cover and I remember, even then, understanding that the future didn't happen the way they imagined it. That disconnect really interested me."

Disconnect is a theme that runs through the book as the protagonist Tom finds himself unhinged in time, moving from a world with robot maids and space vacations, to a world the character finds as alien and hostile (though perhaps merely pedestrian to the reader). "You always deliver a book into a different world from the one you wrote it in, and I have when you look at the politics of the last year, that is certainly the case," he says. That reality hit home as he was recording the audiobook. "I was in the studio one day here in Toronto and then returned a few days later, after Trump was elected president. Suddenly, I was seeing all these resonances to reality, about a man who wants to jump in a time machine to fix the past in order to correct the future."

Mastai adds that he really wanted that it was key for him to make the characters matter just as much as the humor, time-travel and techno wizardry. "I am a huge fan of writers like Junot Diaz and Shelia Heti, writers whose characters are compelling and flourish the page," he says.

Given another moment to for introspection as to what got him to where his is today — successful screenwriter turned-novelist, Mastai goes back to his own youth.

"When I was a teenager growing up in Vancouver, you'd go into a bookstore and there would be William Gibson browsing the shelves, or you'd walk down the street and pass a coffee shop and see Douglas Coupland. Those were huge figures to me, to the scene there, and it didn't seem so strange to want to write the way that they do, to do what they do for a living."

He then adds, "Listen, it probably comes down to this: I didn't get a jet pack for my 9th birthday; I still didn't get one for my 16th, and I didn't get one when I turned 25. So now that I'm in my forties, I wrote out what it might be to live in this world where I could finally have a jet pack. The novel was my own sort of time machine."