"I mean, if in doubt, just generally screw up the world for everyone else, right? That's been the motto of human decision-making since Ug first hit Throg in the head with a rock, and it always seems to have gotten us through. Except for the whole Causality War and breaking everything there ever was into a million billion pieces, of course."

Taking place on the very edge of time, One Day All This Will Be Yours tells the story of the last survivor of the Causality War, a war in which humanity literally destroyed time. Living on an idyllic farm with the help of robots and a pet dinosaur, our protagonist protects what's left of history (and messes around with it just for funsies every once in a while) and does his best to prevent the slightest chance of another war breaking out. He's a bit of a bastard and he's certainly not a good person but he's fun to spend time with and Tchaikovsky did a great job of giving him a very distinct narrative voice.

The first ~third of the novella is a fun little exercise in establishing our protagonist and the reality he lives in, and then after that we settle more into the main plot of the novella, though settle is perhaps not the right word as this novella absolutely zips along. I would expect most people who read this will read it in one sitting and have a jolly good time doing it. Anyway, I won't go into any detail because you don't want to know much more about this than the synopsis, but overall I really liked the plot. I will say, there were a couple of bits where the time travel stuff either became a tad confusing or didn't make complete sense, but for the most part I had no trouble suspending my disbelief.

The only slight issue I had was that some of the humour didn't quite land for me, but that's kind of to be expected with anything that has this much humour in it, it won't all land for everyone. I actually wasn't expecting it to be as funny as it was, Children of Time is the only other work by Tchaikovsky that I've read (well, I read some of Children of Ruin, but I didn't like it).

So yeah, all in all this is a really fun little novella and I'm glad I got the opportunity to read it, I'll definitely be checking out more of Tchaikovsky's books. If you're a fan of time-travel sci-fi then this is definitely worth giving a read.

One Day All This Will Be Yours is a neat novella from Adrian Tchaikovsky - the story revolves around a survivor of the Causality War, a war where the ultimate weapon isn’t a nuclear bomb, but a time machine. Our protagonist has set himself the mission of stopping it all happening again.

And he’s got a pet dinosaur called Miffly... 😍

I enjoy Tchaikovsky’s writing - loved Children of Time 🕷- and this novella highlights why. He takes fairly complex ideas, such as time travel and what I’m going to call the space/time continuum (cos you can’t beat a Back To The Future reference) and makes it understandable. His writing is very conversational in this, the main character is just telling you his story. So all the high brow concepts are presented as just how this man lives - it makes it relatable.

The idea that time travel becomes weaponised isn’t one that I’d come across before, but makes a lot of sense. If we could travel through time, imagine what some of our world leaders would try to do... it’s terrifying.

I also loved the mentions of historical events and figures. One chapter in particular brings some very famous faces together in a scene akin to a WWE Royal Rumble - which is just an enjoyable to read as it sounds! 😂

I couldn’t find fault with this novella - other than it was too short and I really wanted to know more! I give it 5 ⭐️- it’s a great idea, executed incredibly well!

Thank you NetGalley and Rebellion for a copy of the eARC of Adrian Tchaikovsky's One Day All This Will Be Yours. Over the past four or five years, I've read more Tchaikovsky than any other author that's not saying he's my favorite author or that I've liked everything he has written. What he does well is produce just very imaginative stories. Some of them work well for me and some of them do not at all. All the books have a common theme the descriptions make me want to immediately read them.

What I did not expect from this book was to laugh so much. The book description makes it seem like the narrator is on a noble holy war to end all wars.

Well that's his perspective anyways. He may make you believe it for the first half of the story even, but then something interesting happens and his true colors begin to seep into his stream of consciousness and the reader begins to laugh. The guy is real asshole.

I thought I would like this book from the description, but I was surprised with how much I loved it. After a the Causality War went bad, our main character puts himself in the position to never let it happen again. This book does time travel better than I've ever read. It's clever and witty, and had me laughing out loud at the dry humor throughout. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down!

This is a great story about time travels, not just an adventures story with time travel in it, the author try to focus in the consequences that a time war would have, showing a sharp intelligence and an acid sense of humour.

"Nobody knows where they were when the Causality War started" - such a brilliant reversal of the usual line about historic events, perfectly demonstrating what happens when history itself is the thing getting blown up. But after the war is over, with time broken into fragments, one man sits at the end of the end of the line, farming, and making sure that nobody else ever gets to develop time travel again, because when they do, they come visit him, and when that happens he goes back and makes sure they never develop time travel in the first place. In the tiny fragment of Tchaikovsky's bibliography I've read, this reminded me most of Walking To Aldebaran: a lonely, apparently personable narrator, all alone, gradually exposing themselves as an utter monster – here a sort of bucolic, reactive Kang, engaged in a cosmic pulling up the ladder to make Priti Patel green with envy. Obviously there's a bit of a Thoreau satire in the mix too: "How I love the rugged outdoors life! Living out here with nothing but the fields and the animals and literally the best technological support that anyone ever invented." As he jaunts around what's left of the continuum, erasing time travellers and visiting all the best parties, he shares his reminiscences of the war, a conflict gradually becoming less and less comprehensible because each time you change the past you come back to a present where a totally different command structure wants you to do something completely different for entirely unrelated reasons, because you've changed the past. There are some pretty clear parallels with our own plight in this situation where the world gets torn down by people claiming they want to restore a past that probably never existed; on top of that, the narrator makes explicit the similarity with climate change, where humans similarly suffer an uncharacteristic burst of modesty in their deep-seated assumption that surely they're too little to really damage something so big as the Earth, or space-time. Hell, if you squint you could even draw an analogy with the Event from the way that one unwise decision can make one little thing spread until it undoes the whole world. And certainly the 2020s made me feel especially deeply for the refugee from a time when people live without ever seeing outside, "in the certain knowledge that he's going to die young, and that the next generation will die younger, and probably there won't be a generation after that." But a Tchaikovsky book so rarely stays on one course, and soon enough this idyll built on unimaginable carnage is upended. [SPOILER:] And then it turns into a rom-com. The sort with lots of ingenious assassination attempts, except even Mr & Mrs Smith didn't have Stalins in the wacky sidekick role, and yes, that is a deliberate plural not a typo. Oh, and unlike a lot of rom-coms, it really is properly funny, especially once they start dicking around with history and visiting some shards that have already gone completely off the rails. If it's only the second-best short novel about a time war that I've read in the last three years, that's purely because Max Gladstone and Amar el-Mohtar set the bar ridiculously high; it's definitely my favourite Tchaikovsky novel of the year so far, and no, that's not because it's the first (plus he has another one out I've not read, because of course he does. There's at least a fourth in May too, and probably another three in the back half of the year).

(Netgalley ARC)

“We were the time warriors, and we killed time.”

Somewhere, no - somewhen, at the edge of Time (or whatever is left of it after the time-shredding Causality War) is a peaceful idyllic farm where the last survivor of the time war spends his days tending the crops, restoring old Soviet tractors, feeding his pet allosaurus — and murdering any remaining time travelers that come to his “when”, a bottleneck in Time. This is the only way he sees to prevent yet another Time War.

“They all end up here, because this is the end-time. This is all the time there is. This is the trailing edge of what comes later, after the breach in regular transmissions left by the war. A bottleneck, you understand. You want to fling yourself forwards past the badlands of the war, this is where you end up. And I’ll be waiting for you. Nobody gets by me. I have literally all the technology in the world, culled from every moment that anyone ever had a Big Idea, to make sure of exactly that. I am the ultimate surveillance state.”

Except for - of fragging course! - things will not go the way they are supposed to. Many many times. Because threats don’t only come from the shattered past. There will be tractors and dinosaurs and murders and statues and unpleasant visitors and even polite tea time, and bonding over mutual misanthropy and assassination attempts, and it all will be funny and twisted and darkly humorous.

“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.”

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a guy I’d love to hang out with and pick his brain and share a drink or two with. He’s obviously brilliant and wonderfully funny and can pull the rug from out of you with a few sentences that you need to reread a few times just to understand how throughly he just messed with your expectations. All while having a blast with the sardonic and misanthropic and yet objectively funny story that comes from dark places and leads to those even darker — but chuckling along the way. Oh, and you betcha there’s going to be a grandfather paradox — but presented Tchaikovsky-style, with a fresh irreverent take on it and a healthy dose of sarcasm.

“How I love the rugged outdoors life! Living out here with nothing but the fields and the animals and literally the best technological support that anyone ever invented.”

I start to think that there’s nothing in SFF that Tchaikovsky cannot do. He is yet to disappoint me. His books have all been solid for me, and if he doesn’t eventually become one of SFF acknowledged classics, I will be quite baffled.

And if you don’t feel a shiver of dread at hearing the word “twee” after finishing this book, then you, my friend, will need to give that last page or two another read.

4 stars.

“We’ll detonate it and turn their entire postepochalyptic utopia into a wasteland of nothing, and then we’ll go build a new farm on the new broken edge of history, whenever that turns out to be, and settle down to murder time travellers and troll historical figures again. Everyone should have a retirement plan.”

The cynical narrator, the wisecracking antihero, is the last human in the universe, because time machines as weapons of war wiped out every civilization and every person except this guy. Except, time travelers from the future continue to find him at his rustic paradise at the edge of The End. He kills them all, usually by feeding them to his pet dinosaur. He farms with robots. He doesn't need human companionship.

But along comes a time traveler who isn't so easy to kill. This is nearly halfway into the book. This character is so much fun, even our antihero finds himself increasingly less determined to obliterate her.

The time machines are not described in much detail, leaving much to the reader's imagination. The world-building is sketchy. This is not like a Kim Stanley Robinson novel. This is all about swift exposition, no cumbersome explanations to trip over, lots of snark and sardonic wit. The scene where our time travelers summon bad^sses from throughout history reads like a video game, with Hitler trying to outrun a dinosaur, and three version of Jack the Ripper fighting each other. It's a clever idea, but rushed in its execution, which is fine by me. I skim battle scenes and therefore absolve Adrian Tchaikovsky of his (dare I say lazy?) scene-setting and world-building.

As for creativity, freshness, and originality, I wasn't as impressed as other reviewers. "The Dark Side" by Anthnoy O'Neill was more startling and witty, with incredible world-building and lots of juicy science, with pages of footnotes listing source material about features of the moon. No appendix, no science sources in "One Day All This Will Be Yours." O'Neill's assassin android had me laughing out loud, and wincing in horror, and gasping in admiration.

This book is entertaining and well written, witty, insightful, and dark, but not at the top of my favorites list.


Thank you to NetGalley and Solaris for an ARC of this novel.

Have you ever read a book, really enjoyed it but aren’t exactly sure what happened during that book.

No?

Maybe its just me but I have just finished One Day All This Will Be Yours and I loved reading it though I’m not 100% sure what exactly happened. This could be due to my old brain busting nemesis Time Travel.

Our narrator lives an idyllic life. He has an enormous farm with many hi tech robots to look after all the dirty jobs and on it lives his loyal pet Miffly. He spends hours just strolling about his farm or tootling about on his tractor and he has the distinction of being the last human alive. Well sort of....

Our narrator fought a war, a war of time, whole points in time where wiped out and only slithers of time remain. He has tied up the loose ends as much as he can but occasionally he gets visitors from the past and present. He greets them, shakes them down for information and then feeds them, then he literally feeds them to Miffly who I’d better mention is a dinosaur, check the front cover out, thats her.

He is determined to be the last man standing but a series of visitors who don’t end up in the belly of Miffly throw a slight spanner in his works. The past and future may be catching up with him.

This book was bonkers but it was also incredibly entertaining!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I like books by Adrian Tchaikovsky and each book shows me more and more how good he is as an author. His books are so different and at the same time so well thought about that they animate the reader to think about the questions raised.
I seldom laughed so much as reading this book about time travel. The story about a veteran of time wars and protector of the future shows what problems time travel may bring and, of course, the paradoxes are also included. But the author manages through his use of humour to give the complicated and difficult questions a light-hearted not, so the reader can enjoy the bokk.
I can really recommend it.

Witty and engaging novel about time travel. I have to admit I didn't sleep last night, I had to finish it! Dinosaurs, wars, bombs, utopias...
First book by Adrian Tchaikovsky i have read, I will surely go on and read more.

This was wild. Like so wild, just as time travelling stories can be. But maybe even wilder than that. Wow.

I had no idea what to expect but a man living in a farm at the end of time with a pet dinosaur would've never even crossed my mind.

I wanted to shout at the characters because I had a simple solution to their problems that they didn't even think about, which was absurd! I thought that was going to be the first thing.

Besides that, I truly enjoyed how wild this story was. All the talk and complexities of time travelling and how this unnamed man got to live where he lived.

Loved the ending, the last chapters had my heart rate racing!!

This is, unsurprisingly, very good. This author's books are always smart and engaging, and I also appreciate his ability to know when to end it. I'll let others dive into why it has merit. Like his other books, this will be well received and it sell well. Recommended.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

The main character and narrator of this novella starts out defending a pastoral farm setting against leftovers from the Causality Wars. He's the last soldier standing against the chaos that came out of that, in this last unspoiled part of the fractured timeline where everyone enters a sort of funnel to this particular place, and he has rationalized dispatching everyone who arrives as a way to stop the war from re-erupting. To help him in this self-appointed task, he has a pet allosaurus and an assortment of technology he has picked up over the course of history. Midway through the book, however, he receives some visitors with a very different story coming from a place he that provokes a strong negative reaction, and the way he changes his mission boosts the story into a different realm altogether. There is a twist in the last couple of pages which changes his situation in a radical way with an open-ended feel to it, suggesting that we might have more to hear about all of this.

The tone is light, farcical at points. The character is roguish in a way reminding me of what I'd see in New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The author has built his universe in which people travel through time to alter or obliterate history. By the end, I don't completely understand how it is supposed to work, but that's all right. It seems like there's still a lot of playing around with the ideas raised by this brand of time travel, but it doesn't come across as heavy philosophy in any way. I have not read this author's other works but it is my impression that it is a departure from the usual kind of thing he's put out there. I think it's a good choice for readers who might be interested in a different take on themes of time travel.

One Day All This Will Be Yours: Signed Limited Edition
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Hardcover, 192 pages
Expected publication date: March 2nd 2021 by Solaris

This is a clever and witty look at time travel and a fellow that wants to be the last time traveler and last person on Earth. He has Miffly, his pet Allosaurus, who he feeds time travelers to. Our time traveler explains how too many travelers have broken time, fractured it beyond repair. To remedy some of the problems he picks off other travelers, goes back to their origin point and prevents time travel knowledge from developing. He also travels himself to find them.
He has his nice farm with robots to do all the work, sheep, and Miffly at the end of time and quite content with life until a young couple shows up. He is about to feed them to Miffly when they tell him their surprise for showing up. It changes his life! He gets really upset! The action really gets wild then!
This is a fun, crazy book with zany characters I fell in love with! I love Miffly! It's a fun romp through history, society, and what if's! A story of sci-fi time travel and paradox.

I want to thank the publisher and NetGalley for the Arc. The review is voluntary and opinions are all my own!

“Nobody know where they were when the Causality War started.”

At some point in the past, the Causality War began. Nobody knows who started it, when it was started, or exactly how it was started. It was not a war of bombs and guns, but a war that weaponised time itself. Once the first time machine was invented, war was inevitable.

Our narrator, the last time warrior, lives alone on his perfect postepochalyptic ranch (except for his pet Allosaur, Miffly), at the end of time. He has one mission - to make sure that the mistakes of the past are never allowed to happen again – and he will do anything to ensure he succeeds.

One Day All This Will Be Yours is a darkly humorous time travel novella, with all the usual paradox and causality problems inherent with the time travel genre. I didn’t hate it, but it’s by far the weakest of Tchaikovsky’s works that I’ve read to date.

Nothing about the story particularly grabbed me, and the only character I connected with was the dinosaur (which possibly says more about my attitude to humanity than anything else), but I think my main issue was with the length. I can’t settle on whether it’s too long or too short, but it either needs the padding to be cut down to turn it into a short story, or it needs content and characterisation adding to bulk it up to a novel. Either way, the padding and repetition needs to go.

From reading other reviews, my opinion of One Day All This Will Be Yours appears to be in the minority, but I’m just left with a feeling of disappointment. Please don’t read this novella and decide that Tchaikovsky is not for you, as he’s usually head and shoulders above this standard.

I received an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Today I am writing a more personal review. This book was different, really different. It was different to anything I have read before. It delivers the outline from the blurb, but they way it was delivered was unusual and I am not sure how I feel about it.

Most of the story was delivered as a monologue from the main character, this takes a bit to get used to. I quite enjoyed it at the start as it made for an easy read, as I was not jumping around learning different characters points of view.

This story is shorter than what I am used to from Tchaikovsky and it didn’t take long to read. There was at least one part of this story were I shook my head in disbelief, asking myself, “Did he really write that?” Maybe it was supposed to be comedy rather than a factual part of the story (I don’t want to give away spoilers), but this story didn’t amuse me or hit my funny bone.

If you like characters that are definitely not black and white. Characters where you are not sure if you like them or not, or if you want them to succeed or not. This is the story for you.

- The blurb from the publisher, as they do it best -

The bold new work from award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky - a smart, funny tale of time-travel and paradox
Welcome to the end of time. It’s a perfect day.
Nobody remembers how the Causality War started. Really, there’s no-one to remember, and nothing for them to remember if there were; that’s sort of the point. We were time warriors, and we broke time.
I was the one who ended it. Ended the fighting, tidied up the damage as much as I could.
Then I came here, to the end of it all, and gave myself a mission: to never let it happen again.

Thank you to NetGalley & Rebellion Solaris for an advance copy.

@bubblybookreviewer @Netgalley @rebellionpublishing #OneDayAllThisWillBeYours #NetGalley #Rebellion #Solaris #NetGalley #BubblyBookReviewer

The review will be posted to Amazon, Instagram, Twitter & Facebook closer to and on the release date.

"I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, Al Einstein said, but the war after that will be fought with sticks and stones. Except that turns out to be almost exactly wrong, if the weapons the next war is fought with are time machines."
One Day This Will All Be Yours is an acerbically honest take on human nature through the narration of an unexpectedly-funny curmudgeon. "I honestly think someone invented the time machine just so they could go grab a burger from the 1980s when the urge took them. Anyway, turns out saving the planet by eating soy was a bit of a non-starter..."
Although the action moves the story along, the novel is weighed down by preachiness. The narrator ruminates on the meaning of life, war is hell/necessary and society vs. the individual. The repetitive discourses on what time travel is and why it messes with the future seem unnecessary; I assume the target reading audience is familiar with the concept.
The fairly predictable plot was saved by the narrator’s humor and self-awareness, and it was an enjoyable, easy read.
Thank you to Rebellion for the opportunity to review an ARC via Netgalley.

One Day All This Will Be Yours is an upcoming novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky from Solaris press. Like last year's Firewalkers, which I also had a chance to review on this blog, the novella appears to be coming out in limited edition hardcover first, with an ebook version to come a short time later. I've had mixed feelings about Tchaikovsky's work, with his idea filled novels (Children of Time/The Doors of Eden) not really working fully for me, but I did enjoy Firewalkers quite a bit, so I figured I'd give this one a try as well.

And I'm really really glad I did - One Day All This Will Be Yours is easily going to be in the running for my Hugo Ballot in 2022, as a tremendously fun and funny time travel story that kept me smiling and cracking up throughout. The novella's description on retailers' sites would suggest that this could be a serious tale - and no, it absolutely is not - but I honestly am not that upset about it because I feel like to spoil too much of what you're in for with this one would be a shame. The plot of this novella will possibly invoke thoughts of other similar stories from the past few years, but One Day All This Will Be Yours stands easily on its own and is so much fun I would recommend it to basically everyone.




Quick Plot Summary; No one knows why the Causality War started. And no one but me knows how it ended: because I'm the one that ended it. And now, as I enjoy life in joyful solitude at the End of Time, I know that I have to make sure that no one ever finds out how to possibly restart it.

Even if that means feeding them to my pet Allosaurus.

Thoughts: One Day All This Will Be Yours is a time travel novella, featuring a first person narrator who is absolutely resolute in his mission to save time. Well, and more importantly, to save his one carved out space of time at the end of everything where he can enjoy idyllic peace. The result, as you can hopefully tell from my above plot summary, is a novella that is really light and darkly funny, as things go from cynical humor to absolutely absurd humor as things begin to develop.

I'm trying to be vague as hell here, because any spoilers as to what happens here - and obviously things happen - might ruin some of the fun surprises this novella has in store. Needless to say, things get complicated for our narrator, causing him to take drastic measures....measures that only get more and more amusing as we go along, and that, combined with the excellent narration here just made this novella repeatedly crack me up laughing - I finished it in about 30 minutes longer than I expected mainly because I couldn't stop at certain points from putting it down to laugh and smile. Highly enjoyable and recommended, and the rare just plain fun comedic story that I feel is Hugo Worthy.

Poor Miffly!
This was a fantastic book. I was hooked right from the beginning, and read it through until the end. I do like books that are really original with unusual ideas, and this was one of those! It might not be a book for the faint-hearted, but for those who like their scifi quirky, this is a great book. Most of it was also pretty funny, even though it was the kind of humour that you felt that, perhaps, you really shouldn’t be laughing about this! I think that often makes the best laughs.
It is quite hard to write this book without giving any spoilers, and I do so hate those in a review. The blurb is refreshingly concise, and so all I can say is that our antihero decides there shouldn’t be any more wars, and sets himself up at the end of time to stop any future wars, or indeed humans. One day he gets some visitors he really wasn’t expecting, and everything goes wrong from there.
I adored the story of what happened when he met Zoe – what a brilliant relationship! Obviously totally suited to each other. The book was well researched, and I did appreciate that. I laughed or groaned throughout this book, which was beautifully written and one of the best things I have read in quite a while. Keeping things reasonably tight, at novella length, is inspired, and the author has made every word count. He could easily have extended this to normal book length, which I don’t think would have been an improvement. Instead, we have a punchy, hilarious, original and fantastic book which I do not hesitate to recommend to everyone. But, poor Miffly!