I absolutely loved this book!! I read it in one day because I could not stop reading it. This was my first time reading anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky and I was pleasantly surprised.

Brilliant in so many mind-blowing ways. This novella starts a bit grim (it's the end of times after all) but at the end I was laughing. The shenanigans the relatable characters got into were so extremely funny.
I won't get into more details here because the less you know the better; just read this, it's one of the best novellas I read so far.

One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Welcome to the end of time! A farmer lives a quiet life in the aftermath of the Causality Wars, wars that nobody remembers because everybody was unmade. The past has gone, blown apart into chunks of time, which the farmer pops into in his time machine, gathering up goodies to make his life at the end of time even more perfect. Other people do turn up now and again, time travellers from the past, but he sorts them out, following a lovely meal and some polite conversation. There are benefits to having a pet allosaur called Miffly. And then the unexpected happens, the impossible, the future comes to visit.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s science fiction is absolutely incredible, hugely clever, vividly imaginative and wondrous – Children of Time is one of my favourite novels of all time and I loved The Doors of Eden and Cage of Souls. I also love time travel books. The novella One Day All This Will Be Yours was therefore irresistible to me. And there’s a dinosaur on the cover. Oh yes.

Our narrator remains unnamed and our view of the end of the world, the Causality Wars, the broken past, is entirely his. He’s a genial and witty host, generously recounting his experiences of entertaining amusing and astonishing visitors who have come calling, as well as his trips to the little fragments of the past that survive. There is also the elaborate detail of how he keeps his present safe by fixing the past. It’s extremely jovial (albeit distinctly troubling), as he passes the time with us, and then everything changes when the future arrives and he meets his match. It’s fair to say that I was riveted.

As you’d expect from a time travel novel, there are more paradoxes, causality loops and upset space time continuums than you can shake a very friendly but always rather hungry pet dinosaur at. It can be complicated at times but I think you just have to sit back and enjoy it and not try and unravel it too much as that would raise some questions. It’s a novella and so it is short, at a little less than 200 pages, but it is meaty and, as it’s narrated entirely by this farmer, it suits the novella format.

I listened to the audiobook (which lasts three hours and something), which is narrated by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the author himself. I had my doubts about this as authors don’t always make good actors but Adrian is fantastic! As a result, I’ll be listening to more of his other books that I have yet to catch up on. He fully captures the wry humour of our narrator, his tormented personality, his (self-appointed) godlike status, and the sheer absurdity of the situation he finds himself in. And I loved Miffly. Listening to One Day All This Will Be Yours for an afternoon was a perfect way in which to spend time.

Other reviews
Children of Time
Children of Ruin
The Doors of Eden
Cage of Souls
With C.B. Harvey and Malcolm Cross – Journal of the Plague Year

How I Learned to Love the Time Travel Bomb

What’s a grumpy, misanthropic time traveling warrior to do? Governments and factions have misused time travel machines, each using their time machines to remake the past in the way they want it to be, over and over again. Time travel machines really are the ultimate weapon: if you go back far enough you can change history enough that your enemy never has a chance. Except that your enemy’s time traveling agents are cut off from those changes, so they’re still around to try to change history in a different way that favors them. And then there are Causality Bombs, “[f]or when regular time travel just can’t mess up continuity enough.” Now the past is irretrievably broken into shards and splinters.

So our surly main character, the last survivor of the time soldiers, has set himself up as a gatekeeper in a distant future to make sure it never happens again past his point in time. His tech allows him to pull all time travelers heading to the far future to stop in his particular place and time, where he can make sure they never go any further. And when that involves murdering said time travelers — he keeps guns, poisons and a feathery Allosaurus named Miffly just for this purpose (“she is ridiculously adorable when she’s not actually eating people”) — well, that’s just the way it goes. Until one day, when he gets an unpleasant surprise … from his future. Maybe, though, with the help of Miffly, he can solve this latest problem too.

One Day All This Will Be Yours, a new SF novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is wildly intelligent and imaginative, narrated by the main character with lots of irreverent and extremely black humor. You have to be able to enjoy a protagonist who, with no discernable regret, offs any number of innocent people in pursuit of what he views as the greater cause. One of the highlights is when he and a time-traveling antagonist engage in a battle in which each of them has pulled together an army of the worst villains they can find throughout human history: Stalin, multiple versions of Jack the Ripper, Vlad the Impaler, and many, many more.

"In the end there is only one of them left, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Hitler. Basically because he’s been hiding in a bunker all this time. He pokes his head up, and I set Miffly on him. … It’s very therapeutic. And the thing about allosaurs is they can run really quite fast, and the thing about Hitlers is that they can’t, not really, or not for very long."

Tchaikovsky’s concept of time and causality being broken is uniquely executed here in One Day All This Will Be Yours. Our main character makes the most of his access to the past, both for pleasure and to enforce his idea of keeping the far future pristine. Of course, time travel fiction is replete with paradoxes, and everything here isn’t entirely logical — at least, my brain couldn’t quite wrap itself fully around this novella’s concept of time — but Tchaikovsky commits to it completely and pulls you along with him, immersing you in this fascinating and slightly loopy world until you really don’t care any more if it doesn’t altogether make sense.

My only qualm with One Day All This Will Be Yours is that its ending is remarkably abrupt, with reams of hanging threads and no real attempt at a wrap-up. I don’t think I fully get what Tchaikovsky was going for with that ending, other than (view spoiler), but even after a couple of rereads I’m still not a fan of it. As a whole, though, this novella is so very funny, creative and intelligent that I have to give it my strongest recommendation … at least if you’re a fan of dark, flippant humor.

4.5 stars.

Fun, quick read from Mr Tchaikovsky! A bit of idyllic #eotw calm, a sprinkle of all out chaos with a dinosaur (singular) and time travel shenanigans thrown into the loop. Loved the approach & the humour but found it a bit short - in hindsight though it probably rounds out rather nicely as novella. Will probably be writing something more extensive on GR.

... and yes I can still say I haven’t read anything by him that I didn’t like!

To summarize my thoughts about this book I can say that this is a short book (or a “long” story) in which the author enjoys himself immensely. Sure, I cannot say that for sure, but while reading I had the impression that the author had some fun writing it. Mind me, this is not a complaint, at all. It was fun reading, with humor, satire, and some food for thoughts. And it is, also, a very quotable book, as you would see from this short review.


The more technical part, the one about time travel and causality war was a bit messy. I am not the biggest fan of time travel, so I usually don’t think too much about it, and about the paradox and the mere functioning of it all, so I am not the best judge, but I think that some things in there don’t really make too much sense if you seriously think about them. But there are so many other things you can take seriously in this book, even keeping in mind that is a really funny book, that I didn’t really mind.

I call it Causality War because causality was its biggest casualty. We were the time warriors, and we killed time.

And since I am talking about things that didn’t work so well for me, I would just talk a moment about the end. I know I have just started this review and I am going at things backward but since we are talking about my complaints I will go on! The ending, while not really bad, wasn’t really satisfying. It felt a bit rushed, I think that the length of the story doesn’t help here, and somehow lacking. It may be that I am a tad biased because I strongly prefer an ending that really ends, open ending is not a good thing in my book (sorry for the pun) and, even if there are exceptions, I am not usually a fan. So there is that, too, but I think that the author could have done better with its grand finale.


And now we can proceed on the good parts.

One more perfect day at the end of the world.

There are two things that are the best in there. First thing first, our MC. This old and grumpy veteran is charming. So much so! And yes, there is the little downside of him being a killer, since he is hellbent on killing every one of the time travelers that arrive at his farm at the end of time. Because he elected himself as the gatekeeper of the future, and humans are not a thing in there. But nobody is perfect, and even if it may be a bit cold because killing poor travelers is not really the best option, well… In the end, you would not judge him so badly. And the second amazing thing about this book is Miffly, our MC’s pet. And okay, I am partial again because… Pets! What there is not to love with pets? But Miffly is a fluffy dinosaur!! She is an Allosaurus, and she is just so cute.

[I had to…] explain that while T. rex is definitely one of the great iconic dinosaurs, for the purpose of eating people it’s severely suboptimal because, frankly, we’re far too small compared to its typical prey animals. Honestly, I’ve tried it; they’re just not interested in us. They’d be picking little human bones out of their teeth for days, and those tiny arms that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Whereas the Allosaurus, on the other hand, is decidedly closer to our scale. Still terrifyingly big, but a damn sight nippier and far more amenable to a human-sized snack.

And then we have some serious things. Because grumpy old killer and his dinosaur aside, this book is a critic of our world. We get climatic change, we get wars, we get some really bad sides of human nature. And even if it is quite a short book, I think that, on this respite, the author did a good job. Sometimes there is almost the feeling that things can become too much but nope, in the end, all is well balanced in there. And so we get to read something that is funny but also tragic in its fundamental truths.

It’s a lot like when we screwed the climate, to be honest. You never think you’re going to affect something as big as that. I mean, I’m just burning a little coal here, right? The planet’s very big, this piece of coal or cup of oil or forest of trees, it can’t be important in the grand scheme of things. A weird blind spot for a species all too happy to consider itself the centre of the universe in every other way.

So, I had a good time with this book. I cannot say that I loved it, because the time travel thing sometimes is a bit much, and I tend to prefer some less blatant critics. But this is just a minor thing. I smiled quite a lot while reading and I am glad to have finally read this one, both because I want to read more Tchaikovsky’s books and because this one, in particular, is something pretty unique.

3.5 stars

Inventive, unpredictable, hilarious, but far too short. I'd love to see the world and the narrator fleshed out in future books. Absolutely worth the quick read.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest novella, One Day All This Will Be Yours, is a memorable and highly entertaining read – one that I recommend for all fans of time travel stories, especially if you want something tinged with a bit of humor.

The day before the end of the world is a perfect day. One that has been meticulously maintained and crafted for that moment of pure perfection. It was meant to be an isolated retreat. A point in time from which the last survivor of the Causality War could watch their post and prevent another war from happening.

Naturally, things did not go as planned. When all of the fighting should have been done, humanity finds another way to kick it off all over again.

“I'd have to say, No, because there's literally nothing you can do in your time that will change any epoch that comes after you, most certainly not this one. This is how it's going to be.”

Okay, guys, I honestly think that One Day All This Will Be Yours is my new favorite time travel novella, which is saying something, actually. I read quite a lot of them, but this one has the perfect balance of science fiction and humor, and I adore it so much.

If you don't believe me, look at that cover. Then take another look at the description. The wit practically bleeds off the pages in ways that only Adrian Tchaikovsky can pull off. Best of all, it is steeped in something that forces it all to make sense.

Our narrator doesn't have a name, which is another fact that I enjoy. He's the lone survivor of a horrible time war, and clearly, he's got some issues to work through. His way of working through said issues is...different, and that's the core of why this novel is so entertaining.

There are a lot of warped scenes and conversations in this novel, all carefully placed with intent. To take them out of this novella would remove any logic from them, but that's almost part of the joy of it.

“This is how we fought the Causality War. A war where you never saw soldiers from the other side, not because you were launching high-tech projectiles at each other from ridiculous distances, but because you almost never occupied a common frame of reference. The weapons you launched at each other were cascading chains of historical events, and each one simultaneously hit and caused colossal collateral damage, and did no damage at all, because what was left in its wake was a happy smiling world with no idea there was a war on.”

At the end of the day, I find myself conflicted. On the one hand, I believe that the stopping point for One Day All This Will Be Yours is perfect. On the other hand, I would kill to get a chance to read more of this quirky adventure.

Thanks to Rebellion and #NetGalley for making this book available for review. All opinions expressed are my own.

This is a fun Sci-Fi tale if ever there was one. If you've ever thought time travel might be a good and fun thing to do, this book will soon strip you of that belief, and make you regret ever thinking of it.

We follow the tale of a man - the last man on earth, the sole survivor of The Causality War, in which humans invented time travel, used it to wage war against each other, and essentially broke time. Our main character is a bit of a curmudgeon, who has set himself up at the end of time and decided to kill any errant time travellers that come across him. If he eliminates all the time travellers, there can't be another time war. Right?

I don't want to say too much, because this story is best experienced firsthand. It's hilarious, enlightening, and clever. I can't recommend it enough if you want a short Sci-Fi adventure.

I hadn't really given much thought to Adrian Tchaikovsky's work outside of his ten-volume 'Shadows of the Apt', which I've often recommended to epic fantasy readers looking for a different series to try. 'One Day All This Will Be Yours' has made me realise that I've been doing the author a disservice by ignoring his science fiction - a mistake I won't be making again.

This book was an absolute blast. I'm not sure I've ever had more fun reading a book.


I do not say that lightly.


This felt like the literary equivalent of a good Will Ferrell movie. Or maybe the kind of movie that comes out when you’re in college, you watch it with a bunch of good friends and can’t breathe for laughing, and are quoting it endlessly to each other for the rest of your lives. (Super Troopers was the example for me, but I suspect the movie of choice varies greatly depending on when exactly you were born.) I need to get all of my friends to read this book right now so that we can spend years saying things like “let’s feed him to the allosaur!” and “Stalin vs Stalin!” and “I’m Caligula, get me out of here!” and laughing uproariously.


Anyway. Plot. The main character is the sole surviving veteran of the Causality War that left the entire timeline of the universe shattered. The war was fought with time machines, with all sides working to erase the other side from existence while stomping on just the right butterfly to usher in the unending Golden Age for their side. Except that pretty quickly becomes impossible when the side you are fighting for wasn’t destroyed so much as never existed in the first place, but you keep fighting and fighting because … what else can you do?


Our protagonist ends up setting a future bottleneck, after all the destruction, and makes it his mission to keep any and all time travelers from getting past him. Humanity did a great job of fucking up the past, he wasn’t going to let them fuck up the future. So he’s living an introvert’s dream, on his farm at the end of time with his faithful pet allosaurus Miffly. He spends his days intercepting time travelers attempting to reach the future, killing them, and then temporally backtracking them to their origin and making sure that no one then ever discovered time travel in the first place. When he’s bored, he goes and hangs out with Plato or Charlemagne or Rick Astley in the drifting fragments of time that remain.


This idyllic life is abruptly ended when he gets visitors not from the past, against which he stands unsleeping vigil, but from the future. His own descendants, it turns out, which raises all sorts of questions when you’re the very last human in several senses of the phrase. But damn it, he’s worked hard to make sure that humanity does not exist in the future, and he is NOT going to take this lying down, whatever his descendants might feel about it.


This is a novella, so it won’t take you long to read, and it’s worth every second. I really need to read more of Adrian Tchaikovsky.

This novella follows the unnamed narrator who lives at the end of time. He survived the Causality War, a war in which time was destroyed as both sides used bombs that destroyed the time line. Now he catches any unsuspecting time travellers that arrive on his farm and prevents them from messing up time.

The plot was good but it was a little hard to get into. The narrator kept hinting at what had occurred to lead him up to his current point in time without outright stating it. The reader doesn’t get all the details until approximately halfway through. And I loved reading about the cause of the war and the aftermath. It was so idiotic, yet realistic in a way. The rational for the bombs was believable.

The narrator was hilarious, he was by far my favourite part of the story. He’s sarcastic, sociopathic, cruel and determined. I loved reading about his justification for first individual murders and then mass murder. There were so many funny liners, especially when he met another time traveller. I had highlighted some to include in this review but then I deleted the document... oh well.

I would strongly suggest this novella to time travel or sci-fi fans who like a comedic element. The MC can be a bit despicable at times so don’t expect someone all cuddly and nice.

One of my favourite reads of 2021.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

After a couple of disappointing books by Tchaikovsky I approached this novella with certain trepidation. After all, one can become too thinly spread, “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” even without One Ring (unless you want to confess, Mr Tchaikovsky?) I needn’t have worried, tough – this novella is short and sharp and scathing, with long pointed teeth and unrelenting snarkiness that brings to mind the best that stand-up comedy has to offer.

And this novella is indeed written very much in the style of stand-up comedy, with the protagonist wound up to the extreme, never shutting up, venting his anger and misanthropy in an unceasing torrent of words. It’s funny, it’s rabid, it’s sarcastic – but most of all, it’s to the point. You see, in Causality Wars the unnamed protagonist is the veteran of the humanity – and history – ceased to exist. With the onset of time travel rewriting the past became the favorite pastime of governments and agencies, and all the innumerable, contradictory changes to the history carried out by time soldiers resulted in shattering the past and erasing the present. It was still salvageable, more or less – until Causality bombs destroyed the substance of time. And so now, at the end of times, in the one stable point of a glorious indeterminate amount of time, our protagonist treasure hunts the sharp shards of the past, gathering farming equipment, growing veggies and killing random time travellers who inexorably land in his garden, in the farthest possible future. Until travellers from the actual, future, future turn up on his porch and call him Gramps. The gall! Gramps is not happy; he’s a nasty mean old geezer and wants to stay this way forever, so obviously the only thoughts he spared for his bride-to-be are how to most efficiently kill her before they can produce any of that horrible offspring.

Yes, don’t expect this novella to be scientifically plausible. It’s not. It’s a totally absurd, tongue-in-cheek mishmash of the most popular time travel tropes, juggled with admirable deftness and self-awareness by the angry old man in the center of the story. Time travel serves here only as a literary vehicle for funny and sharp critique of our human foibles and vices and prejudices. And if we can get an adorable, feathered, man-eating dinosaur as a bonus, all the better.

[...]

I only have one criticism to offer, though it is twofold: the ending feels truncated and rushed; while it still delivers the payoff, it feels much more suitable to a short story than what in good (or bad, depending on your point of view) old days would’ve been a full-length novel. As for the novella itself, it never feels boring or redundant (ah, well, maybe a little, in places 😉) but I still felt it could’ve been stronger and punchier if it were shortened. Either way, though, One Day All This Will Be Yours is an observant, cutting piece of satire, which has somewhat restored my battered trust in Tchaikovsky 😉.

I have received a copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks.

Having only recently gotten familiar with Tchaikovsky, I was excited to get a preview of this book. Having been a fan of classic sci-fi like Asimov, Niven and more for decades, I love to explore and read more current authors now. I had no idea what to expect from this book, except that the story deals with time travel. I think most sci-fi geeks would have thought with their friends what a war conducted with time machines would be like, but I never imagined the many varied ways it could go. Thank goodness Adrian Tchaikovsky has done this for all of us, because this is a fun, witty and engaging read that I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. The story is told from the first person view of a grizzled and experienced veteran of the time wars, and how he deals with the end of time. This is a relatively short read and I read through it fairly quickly.

#OneDayAllThisWillBeYours #NetGalley

Extremely funny and full of food for thought. A genial, entertaining and gripping novel that kept me hooked.
It’s like a huge what-if that makes you laugh but also reflects on the implications of time traveling.
An anti war novella with a huge twist and a lovely allosaurus, Miffy.
It’s another excellent work by Adrian Tchaikovsky and it’s strongly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this arc, all opinions are mine

Tchaikovsky's done it again. This time a timey-wimey post-apocalyptic dinosaur-featuring novella about rejecting the past and the future for a perfect yet lonely present.

Our narrator lives on the far-flung edge of history - there is no humanity, as far as he knows, after him. He's the remaining soldier from a devastating causality war, and determined that it will never happen again - to the point where he REALLY doesn't like getting visitors and is not always particularly kind to anyone who happens to time travel to his point in existence. Yep, he's not the nicest person, but as he says, "I own to my bastardy".

The writing is deft and humourous - I had to stop and highlight quite a few notes on my Kindle. Only Adrian Tchaikovsky can take you from cavemen eating mammoth to TGI Fridays in Reading in the 1990s in the span of two paragraphs.

The story is unpredictable and quite the ride - my only disappointment was when it ended. I wanted more!

“Another perfect day at the end of the world.”

My thanks to Rebellion/Solaris for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘One Day All This Will Be Yours’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky in exchange for an honest review. I supplemented this with its unabridged audiobook edition, read by the author.

The narrator of this short novel survived the Causality War and he now lives at the end of time. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone but let’s just say that he’s rather territorial.

It is darkly comic with plenty of winks in the direction of tropes associated with wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff. I experienced quite a few laugh-out-loud moments.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an author who over the last couple of years has become a firm favourite of mine. His SF always proves innovative and thought-provoking.

The quirky cover art by Gemma Sheldrake shows Miffly, the narrator’s pet allosaur. Even before reading the synopsis that cover pretty much sold me on this book.

Great fun and highly recommended.

Not even the Spanish Inquisition expected this...

Quite honestly the most entertained I've been by a story for a long time.

Really funny with genuine laugh out loud moments.

Adrian handles the complexities of time travel masterfully without leaving the reader confused.

The main character is tired and just wants to be left alone, pretty sure everyone over the age of 40 can relate :D

Loved it.

This is my first Tchaikovsky book and I really enjoyed it. I love stories with time travel and have watched plenty of Doctor Who to know what happens when you try and change the past. This novella sketches a worst case scenario, where the entire universe becomes so broken it no longer matters what you change in the past, because nothing is connected anymore. Definitely a very interesting concept, and it was well-executed.

I did think the narrator falls into repetition sometimes when he's talking about time and how it doesn't matter anymore, there definitely could've been less of that. But he reminded me of the grandpa in Up in a way; grouchy and longing for peace and quiet. I definitely enjoyed his interactions with the other people he encounters. There were some definite "awww" moments for me, but then again I often find grumpy characters kind of adorable. 😁

Also the descriptions of food in this reminded me of the type of descriptions you'd find of Bilbo's table in the Hobbit and it made me seriously craving a taste.

Thank you to Netgalley and Rebellion Publishing for access to this arc.



Take time travel, end of times, a misanthropic bastard, a large pet, some villain exposition, “get off my lawn” grumpiness, an arranged marriage (yes), and the grandfather paradox, put them in a blender, hit “high” and voila – “One Day All This Will Be Yours.”

The initial chapters give us the setting. Our Narrator (who never has a name) is the survivor of a war that broke time – the only survivor. He’s not only crept to the edge of hell and looked deep into its eyes, he was in hell, wallowed around, and might have been the one to set off one of the Causality Bombs that blasted time, light, the Universe, basically everything into dust. Now he lives the life of a happy son of the soil, growing his crops in his own little Utopia, all by himself except for some robots, various things he pilfers during his time travel trips back to shards of existence, and his pet Miffly. He does have a mission though – to keep all that from ever happening again.

To do that, he’s become ruthless and uses his soldierly skills. This is his piece of paradise, damn it, and he’s not going to let anyone fuck with it. Ever. Then one day something he never envisaged, never planned for, and doesn’t know what to do with happens. Now what? Oh yeah, it’s time to up his game.

I don’t want to give away any more of the game as it’s fun to encounter the next zig or zag that will spin the story in a different direction. Our Narrator is one determined badass with a black sense of humor, lots of tech, and a pet who enjoys having her neck scratched. I kept up with the time inversions and philosophical mind bending fairly well though a couple of times it left me choking in the dust. There were a few things that might not have quite added up and some “well history is totally bent and broken so what does it matter” hand waving to urge me past a thorny “but wait …?” moment. Oh, and in the first few chapters, there’s a lot of telling and not showing.

I also saw a few ways to avoid the conundrum Our Narrator finds himself in that were easier than what he resorts to. But I was having so much fun – honestly, the idea of Hitler being chased around a field by an allosaurus had me in stitches – that I grinned and kept reading. The ending though – hmmm, that didn’t thrill me. I really wanted one thing to happen but another did. Perhaps in the end, Our Narrator can put all his hard won expertise to work and emerge triumphant over twee. After all, he is a misanthropic bastard. B