One Day All This Will Be Yours

All you need to understand is that this was published March 2021, which means it was written end of 2020. Yes, that 2020. You know, the one we began with baking bread together, creating song reels, and planting gardens, and ended up fighting about absolutely everything? By the time the book ends, you too will understand.

It begins sweetly enough, with a pastoral life any introvert would love: a 19th century French farmhouse, a paddock of sheep, a field of cabbages.

"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."

The reader quickly understands that the narrator is a time-traveler survivor, and there has been show more devastation upon devastation upon the timeline. Worn out by never-ending war, he has escaped and sought peace in the only way he understands: by managing time.

"Language just isn’t precise and all-encompassing enough. So we all kept meddling, changing things, changing them back—though not back exactly, just to something closer to the way we thought we remembered it. We kept yanking time about until it broke."

This seems almost logical, practically sane, and if Miffly is perhaps an less-sane tool to achieve those ends, well, at least she's cute and feathery tool, right?

The tone is nonchalant, perfect for the breezy attitude the narrator brings to his problem-solving. It also allows for a healthy helping of humor, both of the darker sort and the absolutely silly kind:

"'We’re getting along platonically just exactly fine.' Meaning we spent all afternoon throwing things at Plato and it was hilarious."

And then, just like in [b:Walking to Aldebaran|42201505|Walking to Aldebaran|Adrian Tchaikovsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1539510199l/42201505._SX50_.jpg|65814044], Tchaikovsky leads us off the effing rails. Genius.

Now, I can be philosophical. Everyone dies, after all; every good time ends. Time itself ended.

By turns darkly funny and a deep commentary on society, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry at the ending. I have trouble managing my transitions, particularly after a story like that. What do you do, go back to normal life and pretend you don't hate people just a little bit?

So I went and played a game where I managed a fish aquarium and all was good.

"It’s a calling. Or, if it’s not a calling, then at least it’s a vocation. Or, failing that, you have to have a hobby, don’t you?" show less

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Someday All This Will Be Yours. Solaris, 2021.
The last few years have seen a resurgence of time travel stories. One of the best was This is How You Lose the Time War (2019). In Someday All This Will Be Yours takes a similar premise, ditches the wistful, poetic romance, and turns it into an occasion for dark snark. The first-person narrator is the last survivor of the time war to end all time wars. He has retired to a farm at the end of time and ruthlessly polices the shattered timelines to make sure that no one gets time-travel technology again. Then an all-too nice couple (he calls them “twee”) with their kick-ass daughter. There were several laugh-out-loud moments. Tchaikovsky is still one of the most original show more scifi writers in the business. A strong four stars. show less

I've been avoiding time travel stories of late (and multiverse stories and alternate history stories) because they usually run into the same boring problem: once the "universe" changes from the hero's timeline (usually MY timeline), it's no longer interesting. Anything can happen and it's happening to people in a different world so who cares? But I got this book as part of a bundle so I read it. And to my delight, the author seems to be addressing the same complaints. And also it's funny. And short.

Adrian Tchaikovsky writes about a time traveler in an ironic and witty style. The main character of “One Day All This Will Be Yours” is determined to be the last time traveler in existence. Seeking to accomplish this, he hacks the time stream in a way that redirects all time travelers looking for the end of time to his robot-harvested gentleman farm. He ingratiates himself to these time travelers when they arrive to put them at ease so that they disclose the time and place that they came from. After feeding them to his pet dinosaur, Miffly, he travels back to the time of their origin and makes subtle scientific and political changes to assure that time travel from that era is never discovered. Of course, he being immune to the show more effects of these changes, his existence is not impaired.

The book is a fun read. It had me laughing and had my head spinning as I tried to follow the author’s convoluted descriptions of time travel anomalies. show less

The world is at absolute peace! Because the world consists of only one human being. And he is living at the end of time after surviving the causality war—the war that shattered time itself, making it impossible for events to follow one another linearly, and is determined to never let it happen again. Where, and when, he lives is the ultimate place, and time, that any time traveller from any era can hope to reach. But that travel will be the last, both for the traveller as well as their entire generation, for that is what our hero, or anti-hero, ensures to keep world peace. Now, he has some visitors who are different from his regular visitors from the past, and his paradise on earth and his position as the lone man standing between the show more past and the future are in danger of getting destroyed.

If my summary of One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky written above is incomprehensible, it just shows my inability to summarise this magnificent, ingenious, hilarious, compelling piece of science fiction without robbing its would-be readers of the fun I had reading it. I confess that I have not read much science fiction, leave alone those about time travel. But, even with my limited experience, I can say without any hesitation that this one is surely among the best! The author’s imagination of a war fought along the fourth dimension is one of the greatest I have read in the past few years. The character of the narrator, the sole survivor of the war, is complex; he is simultaneously the most scrupulous human being on earth and—to quote another fine character from this book—a misanthropic bastard who does not want to share his heaven with anyone. The other characters, though there are only a handful of them, are interesting too.

Right from the start, this novel catches the reader by the neck and never lets go. The author’s dark humour is worth a lot of laughs. Within less than 200 pages, the author has packed so much that rereading and re-rereading it is the only way to enjoy the multiple layers on display. My only grumble—one powerful enough to dock a star from my rating—with this fantastic tale is about its shortness and its cliff-hanger ending. I would have loved the book to be twice its present length, and the opportunity to follow the protagonist into the heady worlds of time travel. I enjoyed every bit of it and am waiting for the next volume eagerly.

My sincere gratitude to NetGalley, the author and the publishers of One Day All This Will Be Yours for the digital ARC in exchange for my unbiased review, which is available here... https://www.netgalley.com/book/210704/review/670189 show less

This is brilliant in every possible way and I am not able to do it justice with a review.

It has a nice concept - time travel - and it explores it properly.
The main character is very compelling.
The book is funny, filled with amusing observations. Until it isn't.
The narrator is just perfect(the author himself).
It is of perfect length. I wouldn't remove any part of it, nor did I find it lacking anything.
It is written properly. It feels like Tchaikovsky is a real writer, not just a story teller. He has a nice turn of phrase.
Like most great Sci-Fi, this book isn't about time travel or robots. Those are just excuses to tell a different story, to cover some themes.

I started recommending this book to everyone even before finishing it. Even show more with a weak ending it was worth reading. And then I finished it and realized I was recommending it for the wrong reasons. The blurb didn't do the book justice, as it's not (only) a comedy. It's way more than that.

This is one of the best endings I ever encountered. It is unexpected in all the best ways. But what is more important is that the ending nails all the book's themes. All of them. It captures the whole vibe of the book in one sentence - it's a tragic-comic wordplay. A stupid pun that underlines everything the book is about.

An absolutely fantastic experience start to finish. It goes onto my favourites bookshelf. show less

Our nameless, faceless protagonist in this light-hearted post-epochalyptic tale has charged himself with protecting the future, so to speak. The past has been completely decimated in an endless series of time and causality wars. He will not only kill but erase anyone who threatens the future.

I went straight into this from Becky Chambers' Closed and Common Orbit and – talk about culture shock – the two could not have been more different. And I mean that in the best possible way (on both sides).

Chambers doesn't so much write novels as she does character studies in story format. This, on the other hand, isn't so much a novella as it is a philosophy/game theory/sociology textbook in story format.

If you enjoy stories that make you think, show more that leave you lying awake asking yourself how time works, this one's for you. show less