Cover Image: One Day All This Will Be Yours Signed Limited Edition

One Day All This Will Be Yours Signed Limited Edition

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Member Reviews

If anyone wants to try the works of this author then this short novella is the right place to do so. An interesting one this was.

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I'm very rarely on the side of humanity in sci-fi settings, and I love a bit of bleak/dark humour, so this was great for me. Arguably it's a bit gratuitously violent but, as the narrator says, once you've broken time itself, it really doesn't matter. Very similar in tone to Walking to Aldebaran, and I liked that a lot too.

Shout out to my 6 year old for imparting so much dinosaur knowledge simply by talking at me incessantly over the past few years that I was familiar with every single dino fact, figure and term in this book already.

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I really enjoyed this novella. There were some very amusing moments and the overall tone was dry. With that being said, this isn't a 'fluff' piece. It discusses difficult concepts without talking down to the reader, which I appreciated. My only criticism is that I thought the ending was a little bit abrupt, but overall this was a very interesting and entertaining read.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

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This was a delightful little novella and a very nice introduction to the author, as far as first impressions go.

The story itself is quite an interesting take on time travel that I haven't seen explored before, even though there is a certain logic to it. If someone was sent back in time to change the past, the present they come back to wouldn't be like the one they left. And if they are sent again to change it back because say another faction changed something in the past to suit their agenda... well, there is no guarantee that the change they make will bring back the same present they were born in. So what you have left with in the aftermath of a time war is a bunch of time agents trying to fulfill the agenda of governments that don't exist anymore, or have never existed, depending on the twists the time war took along the way. That just keep changing things and fighting each other through time because they have no present to come back to. In some cases, they never even existed in the new present, because their parents never met or they died when they were a child.

This is meaningless slaughter both of people and of the time continuum until one time agent realizes that time is already so irrevocably broken that fighting over it doesn't make sense anymore. His solution? Eliminate all the other time agents, then eliminate anyone who might ever invent a time travel machine. Anywhere. Anywhen. It's brutal, it's ruthless, and it's very in character with our protagonist.

He isn't a nice person. I would go as far as call him a psychopath, but anyone who'd fought in a time war for endless iterations of said time would have to be. He sits in the bottleneck between the broken remains of the time that was before and doesn't let anyone with time travel technology get past him into what will become after. And he is perfectly happy to enjoy his little paradise of now in solitude. Until a time traveler comes from that after and claims that he created their whole civilization...It was a fun read, even though all the characters in it were equally awful. Like I already said, the protagonist is a killer with absolutely no remorse or scruples, and the people he is fighting against are coming from a society that is just as awful, so as a reader I couldn't really root for either of them. They both deserved to be erased out of time for different reasons. Heck, the only character I was rooting for was the dinosaur, but that's because how cool would it be to have a pet dinosaur?

But even thought the characters are awful, it's a fun romp through the broken shards of time watching them heap horrible things on each other. The ending was not what I had expected, but I admit that it has a certain poetic justice to it. It also leaves the door open for a sequel.

All in all, this was an enjoyable read that kept my attention for an afternoon and I wouldn't mind revisiting this if the author ever writes a sequel.

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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this was such a fun read, the characters were great and I enjoyed the plot line in this book. It was such a well done story and I always enjoy Mr. Tchaikovsky's writing.

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In 100 pages Adrian Tchaikovsky sets up a complex time travelling universe where time is in fragments and no continuity exists. Within that he narrates (from his lead male characters POV?) about love, loss, existence, and evolution. It’s really quite an impressive feat for 100 pages.
The only downfall, for me, is that the leading lady he meets and hangs out with for a time is a bit blah. She’s interesting at first but quickly seems to just be along for the ride as a possible baby incubator. As though Tchaikovsky wishes he didn’t need her in order to keep his storyline of the possible outcomes of the future intact.
If not for this point, this could be a five star novella.
A wonderfully quick, science fiction, time travelling focused story. The perfect sort of teaser is you’re unsure about classic sci-fi approach. It has enough so you can get a sense of the genre; but not too much that most won’t get to the end and at least understand that most sci-fi is all about the ending. Especially in a universe where time is no longer linear, or even really continuous; it’s more of a moment that both exists and doesn’t exist all at once (yes that a Schrödinger’s cat reference as the icing of this little review. Lol.)

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

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I didn't know I needed Adrian Tchaikovsky to write a time-travel romantic comedy, but he has and of course it is brilliant. Perfect at its novella length, and surely ripe to be adapted into a film. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

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This felt similar to other novellas I have read by Tchaikovsky despite being a completely new concept and characters. In this case, a former time traveling stops at the “end of time” to prevent the time war from occurring again. The ending, which I won’t spoil, is abrupt and may not be everyone’s cup of tea but fit the narrative flow to me and the overall theme. I read it in a single sitting and enjoyed it, so I gave it four stars. It is a fun and light story. There really isn’t much character development and I would recommend it to other who enjoyed novellas from Tchaikovsky (his novels are very different in my experience and I loved Children of Time). The pet dino was also fun.

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The synopsis is very interesting and I was sure I'll love this, especially as I thoroughly enjoyed some other books by Tchaikovsky, but unfortunately I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I found there are elements missing from the world building and time-coherence, and I didn't particularly like the sociopath nature of the characters.
The one thing that saved it for me was the witticism and snarkiness of the main character.

* Plot: 4★
* World building: 3.5★
* Characters: 3.5★
* Sense of time: 3-★
* Coherence/Consistency: 3-★
* Language/Humor/Witticism: 4★
* Enjoyability: 3.5★

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The problem with wanting to change things is that, well, things change. The problem with time travel – or at least scientifically-based time travel – is that the things that change are fundamental to the reason you time travelled in the first place.

In other words, it makes a mess. And going back to fix the first mess makes an even bigger mess. And so on and so on, ad infinitum, until history and facts and even ordinary causality are totally FUBAR’d beyond all recognition or possibility of repair.

In a way, that’s the premise behind One Day All This Will Be Yours, that the war to end all wars was a time war, and that all of the combatants – along with the governments and organizations that sent them – lost complete track of what they were fighting for, who sent them, why they were sent, and even, to some extent, who they were, because all of those antecedents had been lost in the continued fracturing and refracturing of time.

The past can’t be changed. Well, it can, but the result is just an increasing level of chaos. Which leads our unnamed and unreliable narrator in the Last Lonely House at the End of Time to his resolve to make sure that no one can ever restart the endless cycling chaos of time travel by sitting in that house with all of the best stuff that he has taken from all the best of all the fractured eras, watching and waiting for any errant time travelers to land their time machines in his backyard.

So he can kill them and prevent the time and place that they came from from ever developing time travel. It’s a lonely job, but this veteran of the Causality War has decided that someone has to do it and that someone is him.

It’s all going just fine until a time machine slips through his net from the one time and place he never expected to receive time travelers, because he believed he’d guaranteed that it would never exist.

They’re from the future. His future. The future he’s sworn to prevent at all costs – although admittedly those costs are mostly to other times, places, and people.

The worst part of this invasion from the future is that his descendants are perky. And determined. Downright compelled to make sure that he creates the future that gives rise to their perky, perfect utopia.

This means war.

Escape Rating A-: The surprising thing about this book, considering that it’s the ultimate post-apocalypse story, is just how much fun it turns out to be. Because in the end, this is a buddy story. It’s an enemies-into-besties story where the protagonists are absolutely determined that it not become an enemies to lovers story.

Because neither of them like the rest of humanity nearly enough to want to make more of it. Especially because that other side wants them to do it – literally – just so damn badly.

So the fun in the story is in the time bonding, as these two misanthropes who are supposed to repopulate the world exercise their determination to just say no, all while having a fantastic time time-tripping through all the best eras that fractured history ever had to offer.

Time travel can be handled any number of ways in fiction, all of them equally valid because we just don’t know – although it’s a fair guess that if humanity ever manages to make it happen we’ll probably screw it up somehow. This story treats history as one big ball that is endlessly mutable – then sits back at the end of the time stream to observe just how badly it’s been mutated.

Another book that did something similar, with more romance and less snark, is last year’s This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I wasn’t as big a fan of Time War as most of my reading circle, however I thought One Day was a really fun read. Last year’s book was less straightforward and more lyrical, while this one tells a similar story with a lot of gallows humor and it just worked better for me.

Also this is a more straightforward story – in spite of the time travel. There’s that fixed point at the end of everything that the characters keep returning to that helps to anchor the story. Any time travel they do together or separately is treated as tourism. Time is so screwed up that while they don’t have to worry about whether or not they change anything, they also aren’t interested in changing anything in particular. If the butterfly flaps its wings differently in the wake of their passing, they’re not going to be affected by it in their little cul-de-sac at the end of time.

But as much fun as this was to read – after all it’s a story about two people at the end of the universe essentially pranking each other into eternity – after all the laughs it’s kind of sad at the end. Because even by not doing the thing – and each other – that they’ve both sworn not to do, the thing they were trying hardest to prevent has happened anyway.

There’s no way to stop it except by starting another one of the thing they vowed to prevent in the first place. Whatever began the original time war, theirs will be powered by, of all things, irony.

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Time travel is fun because it makes your head hurt (especially if the author takes a loose approach to explaining how time travel works). Time travel is fun because of the nonlinear story possibilities. Time travel is fun because you can see what happens when you try to kill your own ancestors. This book has all of that plus dinosaurs and soviet-era tractors! Honestly, Tchaikovsky has written a really fun novella here, fun and action packed and filled throughout with some casual misanthropy and regret over the consequences of tribalism and war. An engaging, thoughtful read (even if I never totally understood how one could break the time line....).

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I've heard a lot of praise for Adrian Tchaikovsky over the years but had never read him before this year. The first thing that caught my attention about this novella was the dinosaur on the cover but then I read the synopsis and I was sold! And this story was so much fun!

What would you do if your time war broke time? That's what this story explores. And it was a cynical portrayal of time travel and a time war and what someone would do to end said war. It gave me some serious This is How You Lose the Time War vibes and I loved it! I laughed so much while reading this and the farm setting at the end of time was a perfect main setting for the novella! It made me want a Miffly so badly!

I want to fangirl a little bit about how this story took the time travel trope and turned it on its head! At the first of the story, I thought I knew where the story was going but I was totally wrong. I was trying to mow my lawn while listening to this and I found myself standing in the middle of my yard just listening to the story. I was enthralled from the start.

I’ve had an ARC of this book for a while but I ended up checking the audiobook out from my library which was an A+ decision on my part. The author narrates the audio and his performance increased my enjoyment of the story. It's on the shorter side and can easily be listened to in less than a day.

I can't recommend this novella enough! I can't wait to dive into Tchaikovsky's backlist later this summer!

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3.5 rounded up. It’s been a week since I finished this book. I’ve just been really busy, but I need to write a review at least to thank NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the ARC. What a relief that this ARC’s formatting was not a mess like the last wine I read.

This is a brief book about love in the end times of a time war. Sounds similar to This is how You Lose Lose the Time War. But that is where the similarities end. Firstly, this story is much more straightforward and the nature of the war not nearly as nebulous. Also, it is not your average love affair. In fact, there is nothing romantic that occurs at all. But they know what they have to do and grow together. Sort of.

The tone is humorous and had me snickering a bit here and there.

All in all, I quite enjoyed it. I wish I’d been able to read it in bigger chunks though. I think it doesn’t support an extended read. Try to read it in one go, if possible. Or over just a few days.

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Brilliant and funny if your a fan of Adrian Tchaikovskys previous books you will not be disappointed with this one..

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Another fun piece from Tchaikovsky. I was particularly fond of Miffly and I hope she is okay. She is a good allosaurus who did nothing but look out for her family and there better have been a plan to ensure that she survives the end of the end of the time wars.

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I really enjoyed this sci-fi novella, this is my first time reading Tchaikovsky and it definitely won't be my last. I really enjoyed this take on time travel, it shows how it can all go catastrophically wrong and ruin the whole world. It was also a very humorous story and I really liked the voice behind it. I think this worked very well as a novella, it had enough time to explain all the time stuff and have a small plot. I did find it quite confusing for the first couple of chapters but after that I found it very enjoyable. The plot itself was nothing too complicated which made it easier to read with the confusing time travel bits. I'm not always a fan of time travel stories as the more you think about it the more complicated it can get. But in this case the complicated nature helps explain how the whole mess came about.

I loved that the main character had a pet dinosaur and used it to clean up his messes. The plot was good and for the most part very fun. I liked the openness of the ending, I feel it could have gone on longer but it didn't need to. I ended up really enjoying the characters, nobody was a good person and were not against destroying people and timelines to meet their own ends. It was a great story to show how time travel goes wrong and how something so complicated should not be messed with. It was so much fun, I liked when they went back in time and we see different figure from history. Overall it was a very quick and enjoyable read, I'd definitely recommend it.

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A wild ride and not a little bit confusing, but in a good way. The plot was all over the place, though, and didn't wrap up very well. I'm not sure I fully understand what Tchaikovsky was trying to do.

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At just under 200 pages, this was either a long novella or a very short novel, narrated by an unnamed narrator, the sole survivor of a time travel/time and space annihilating war, living alone on the last edge of time and killing any time travelers who make it there to prevent the war from starting again, when something happens that changes everything. It’s both dark and snarky, confusing and clever, very readable but then sort of just ends. I didn’t love it but it definitely was interesting. Probably most interesting to me though was the contrast with the two other books by Adrian Tchaikovsky I have read, Children of Time and Children of Ruin, which could not have a more different tone, serious and emotional and really bringing characters (even non-human characters), so vividly to life. It shows how versatile he is that this is so different, but I preferred those books. 3.5 stars.

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"I am the full stop to the sentence that is human history. That's the point."

We never get to know the name of the main character of this time traveling novella.
But as he slowly unfolds his story, more and more details are revealed both about his past and his present life.
Because he now lives alone at the end times, also known as the postepochalypse.
Well, not entirely alone …

"She might be several tons of ravaging therapod dinosaur, but the old girl is also just a big softy; feed her and rub her tummy and she's yours forever."

His dinosaur pet Miffly keeps him company.
She's certainly one of the most original pets you'll encounter in a fantasy book.
Every scene with her in it will make you laugh. That's guaranteed!

"By setting up shop here where the regular passage of time recommences, and denying access to the future to all comers, I am saving the unseen future from interference. I am time's gatekeeper, and without me the future would become the same ruin as the past."

Our storyteller doesn't want history to repeat itself and thus sees it as his vocation to stop humanity.
He'll be the last survivor.
At least, if he can stop all the time travellers who succeed to get to the point where he's now.
As he says himself:

"I have come to value my solitude, here at the postepochalyptic end of time. I don't mind visitors, but I make sure they don't stay long and, simultaneously, never leave. And I make sure nobody can ever come looking for them."

In order to maintain his goal, he regularly goes back to the past to set things right.
Lots of interesting thoughts are discussed. The only downpoint is that some of those interludes felt a bit like page-filling with repetition of the same ideas over and over again.
Luckily there's always humour present which gives a certain lightness to the whole:

"I do wonder whether the way things turned out after the Causality War was inevitable the moment someone invented the first time machine (and the problem with someone inventing the first time machine is that someone else immediately took a trip to ten years before and invented the first first time machine so they could grab the patent, and so on, and so on)."

This book offers an excellent mix of serious subjects (like war), funny thoughts (delicously black humour), an uncommon romance (just read it for yourself to find out), …
For people who already know the works of Adrian Tchaikovsky, this book is apparently quite different in approach than his other books. But after all, isn't that one of the main qualities of this author?
If on the other hand this is your first acquaintance with him, it's without doubt a very nice introduction to a talented writer.

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A charming and quirky tale of time travelling in search of utopia, with pet dinosaurs and annoying relatives that just mess everything up! One of the things about Adrian is that he can move seamlessly from genre to genre. His characters are always plausible, relatable even if not always personable and well developed in a reasonable timescale. His writing style is fluid and engaging from the first chapter. This book was no exception.

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