One Day All This Will Be Yours
Ratings24
Average rating3.9
ARC received due to NetGalley.
I liked the book, although it definitely needs a sequel!
An unexpected take on time travel, wars, and other time travelers. Plus dinosaurs, of course.
One Day All This Will Be yours, Adrian Tchaikovsky's newest novella releasing in early 2021, is a brilliant and witty time-channel take on what happens when you are the only one left, and you damn well want to keep it that way.
Our titular narrator wakes up from his calm and untroubled clumber. He peers out onto his estate; there isn't a cloud in the sky. And, even if there was one, a little rain is good. Bring on the rain for us farmer types, he thinks. It is a beautiful day because everything and all days are gorgeous, forever and ever amen. This beauty was hard fought for in a winner take all fight over the future, past, and every branch of possibility spread out forever—the casualty war. A war waged by many who could not remember why they were fighting. The past had been expunged, and the future was a fractured mess.
The narrator, the last soldier of the causality war, and his cohorts fractured and dismantled time itself. If you don't like the current path this government is on? Go back and sew discord 200 years ago so that that government won't come into existence. Don't like that Einstein helped develop the Manhattan project, go back in time and scare him so badly about what his ideas wrought that he destroys everything around his energy formula. It takes the philosophical question of, “would you go back in time to kill Hitler as a baby” to a whole new level.
The list goes on and on. So much so that there isn't much left after time has been tinkered with so much. Just pockets of reality that disintegrate in the blink of an eye when they reach a critical moment.
It is as if many malicious time lords from “Doctor Who” were warring with each other had no scruples.
How do we get to the point of a bright sunny day on a perfect farm? Well, if I told you that it would spoil the fun, and in the words of River Song from Doctor Who, “Spoilers!” However, know that it involves an Allosaur named Miffly, poison (occasionally), a couple of statues, and a possible sarcastic bastard of a soldier, or he just might be lonely. It's hard to tell.
This soldier narrator has an excellent reason to act the way he acts and do the things he does without compunction. In his saving the future and living it up as best as possible, he faces something that challenges everything. That is the exciting part.
One Day All This Will Be Yours is another brilliant science fiction novella in the sea of Tchaikovsky's deep and brilliant catalog. Tchaikovsky has proven in the last decade or so that he is a man who can write anything. Such as science fiction, as seen in his Children of Time series, where he eventually became known as the “spider guy.” Walking in Aldebaran, where he smashes horror and science fiction, creating an existential take on madness. Or his huge epic Shadows of Apt series. A sprawling and immense epic story involving beings known as Kinden. You would be hard-pressed to find a story by Tchaikovsky that is not a great read. One Day This Will Be Yours, which takes the time-travel-gone-crazy trope and turns it on its ear, is another excellent read to add to his catalog.
Pacing and world-building wise, Tchaikovsky understands the fundamentals needed for a tight and gripping novella. Unlike regular novel lengthed stories, novellas have a stricter economy of words. You only get so many words to work with to create world-building, dialog, and character arc. It is the same constraint that short story writers deal with but to a more extreme extent. Some writers are good at this “dialed in” type of writing style, while other writers are very good at it. I would put Tchaikovsky in the latter group. I have read three of his novellas/short novels recently, and not in a single place did I ache for some part of story creation that was lacking. Readers loathe to branch out into novella/short novels and short story length stories because some writers struggle to pare their ideas down to the minimum word count with the maximum effect.
This problem isn't the case in One Day All This Will Be Yours.
The humor is wry and witty; the narrator's situations are hilarious and wild but do not stray into the ridiculous or uncomfortable. The pacing is quick, a must for a novella. And, the story overall is sweet in its own twisted way.
I loved this book, in case you can't tell. It will find a place of honor on my bookshelf and as a delightful reread in my future.
I really enjoyed this book.
A quirky, humorous view of time travel, and what happens (or doesn't happen) when it gets out of control.
Set at the end of time, where Time has been decimated by the Causuality War. The nameless hero, the last survivor in this era, is trying to live a peacful life farming, and playing with his pet dinosaur. However the quiet life is about to be disturbed ...
Adrian Tchaikovsky at his best.
I wasn't sure whether to rate this 3 or 4 stars. This is not punchy enough to be a short story and not meaty enough to be a novel. It's certainly an original story, but it didn't really feel weighty or pointed. It was fine.
A fun and unique tale of the problems that arise when humanity develops time machines.
One Day all this Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
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The last man on Earth sat in a room.
There was a knock on the door.
It was a time-traveler, of course.
This is a fun romp. The length of the story is in the novelette length, so it makes for a quick read.
The protagonist is the last survivor of the Time War, which has fractured time. He is the last survivor mostly because he has worked hard to kill everyone else. Now, he is sitting at the first stable point where time begins again. He spends his time farming and murdering time-travelers who land on his piece of paradise. Then, he learns that there is a time-traveling civilization in the future, and he is its founder.
This is a development that he will not accept.
The story is a fun, lightweight, amusing tale of how he tries to keep his perfect world.
In a post-apocalyptic time and space, mankind is practically extinct due to a time war. At the end of time a sole survivor - a former soldier - sits and gleefully murders any stragglers. In order to remain alone and to prevent another rise of humanity and, thus, another war, he also travels back in time and happily commits genocide or whatever it takes to eradicate the survivors' communities as well.Yes, murder and genocide for good fun. And as if that wasn't enough in itself: I didn't find it funny in the least. When this novella wasn't about (mass) murder, it was about the cheapest kind of trolling.One disgusted star out of five.Blog Facebook Twitter Mastodon Instagram Pinterest Medium Matrix TumblrCeterum censeo Putin esse delendam
A perfect little time-travel romp that delights and bails out before the shine wears off. Smart, thrilling, and hilarious, I wish I could read it all again for the first time, but maybe there's a me out there doing just that tomorrow.