One of the oddest, most creatively imagined, stories I've ever read, even in a genre which stretches to the far, far distant almost unimaginable future and flexes back to the initial first instance of the Universe, ONE DAY ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS is the kind of intellectual Science Fiction which inspires, stretches the brain, and elicits that essential passion for scientific discovery. It also boggles the imagination, as author Adrian Tchaikovsky slips readers through one time stream after another, upending cosmic paradoxes, while simultaneously developing character arc and evolution in a gloriously riveting plot. A mind-bending, mind-blowing, story! I adored it! Definitely a best of year!

Tchaikovsky has always demonstrated a flair for infusing, sparingly but deftly, some deliciously humorous elements in his writings, but with One Day All This Will Be Yours he takes it to a whole new level.

This is a story of a war gone wrong - very, very wrong - after the introduction of time travel. And one man's mad quest to ensure it won't ever happen again, at any cost, morality be damned. Tchaikovsky proves, once and for all, the ultimate futility and devastation of a time war. One that leaves soldiers fighting for a side that no longer exists and likely never will again.

Deeply sardonic, and frequently ridiculous, this is a clear warning to you would-be time machine inventors that your technology will, despite all your benign intentions, inevitably be used for nefarious (and perhaps hilarious) purposes.

FORMAT: Published 2021 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,. Length - 192 pages. Cover art by Gemma Sheldrake

REVIEW: Absolutely brilliant. The story’s narrator, the sole survivor of the War To End All Wars, lives on a farm at the end of the world. He’s a time warrior and occasional murderer of errant time travellers. Whenever someone gets there, he makes sure they’ll finish their journey in the belly of his pet Allosaurus, Miffly. And after that, he makes a time-travel to destroy his unwanted guest’s culture ability for travelling in time.

He has good reasons to act this way, and he believes he’s doing it to save the future. But it’s also possible he’s just a misanthropic bastard who enjoys being the last surviving human being and has no intention to share the rest of history with anyone.

I probably told you more about the plot than I should have, so I’ll stop right now. One Day All This Will Be Yours offers a wildly irreverent take on a time travel-gone-wrong trope. It turns the grandfather paradox inside out. It’s hilarious and clever, and Tchaikovsky’s thoughts about the destructive potential of time-travel made me rethink the coolness of the concept.

People have described a lot of things as an ultimate weapon, a doomsday measure, a holiday at the final resort. None of them were, not really. Even nukes are just a better way of killing people that leaves a longer-lasting stain on the carpet. City-devouring intercontinental missiles and orbital railgun strikes: these things are on a straight line of development from slings and thrown rocks. But time machines really are the ultimate sanction. And just like the nukes of an earlier era, by the time the war started, everyone had them, and everyone had signed a lot of important pieces of paper swearing they wouldn’t use them. Because we knew that as soon as anyone actually used a time machine with hostile intent, that would be it.

One Day All This Will Be Yours has a great pace, compelling (if deliberately overdrawn) characters, serious questions to ask, and tons of cynical humor that almost made me roll on the floor. It hides plenty of surprises, brilliant ideas, and quotable lines. Without spoiling much, I can mention for example that the narrator loves his farm and travels in time to pick up an older model of a tractor or, when in the right mood, to party with Jackie Onassis, Lord Byron, or Nero.

I expect KJ Parker’s fans will love the flippant tone of the book and the narrator. I planned to avoid comparisons, but kept this one. I feel One Day All This Will Be Yours will resonate with a much broader audience than most of Tchaikovsky’s books. It shares Parker’s acerbic (and delightful) wit and take of human nature, but it copies nothing. It simply shows how versatile Tchaikovsky is as a writer. And here he’s in the prime form.

I absolutely loved it. With its frenetic pacing, irreverent tone, and fresh ideas, it ensures a great reading experience. A true gem.

„One Day All This Will Be Yours” is a humorous, smart and fast-paced novel that will send you to the world after the War To End All Wars.

One person survived the biggest war of our times. It wasn’t on sticks and stones as Einstein thought, but it was a time travel war.

People kept going back to the past, trying to fix the mistakes that were made. More people were altering their mistakes, creating new ones, destroying time chain and at some point no one really knew what was in the past and what wasn’t. Which version of the reality is the right one? And then everything was destroyed with bombs. The narrator of the book decided to make sure that there will be no more war. He created a space at the end of time where all time travellers landed, and he went on a quest to kill them all. Sometimes he fed them to his allosaurus Miffly, sometimes he shot them, with some he had very meaningful conversations.

Everything was going well... until he meets travellers from the FUTURE.

Twisted tale of time travel, murder, holidays in the best times of the past and dinosaurs.

I’ve read it after a really exhausting week at work and I honestly couldn’t find a better book for that time. I enjoyed every page, I laughed out loud and I fell in love with Miffly!

Thank you Solaris for providing me an ARC through the NetGalley.

One Day All This Will Be yours, Adrian Tchaikovsky's newest novella releasing in early 2021, is a brilliant and witty time-channel take on what happens when you are the only one left, and you damn well want to keep it that way.

Our titular narrator wakes up from his calm and untroubled clumber. He peers out onto his estate; there isn't a cloud in the sky. And, even if there was one, a little rain is good. Bring on the rain for us farmer types, he thinks. It is a beautiful day because everything and all days are gorgeous, forever and ever amen. This beauty was hard fought for in a winner take all fight over the future, past, and every branch of possibility spread out forever—the casualty war. A war waged by many who could not remember why they were fighting. The past had been expunged, and the future was a fractured mess.

The narrator, the last soldier of the causality war, and his cohorts fractured and dismantled time itself. If you don't like the current path this government is on? Go back and sew discord 200 years ago so that that government won't come into existence. Don't like that Einstein helped develop the Manhattan project, go back in time and scare him so badly about what his ideas wrought that he destroys everything around his energy formula. It takes the philosophical question of, "would you go back in time to kill Hitler as a baby" to a whole new level.

The list goes on and on. So much so that there isn't much left after time has been tinkered with so much. Just pockets of reality that disintegrate in the blink of an eye when they reach a critical moment.
It is as if many malicious time lords from "Doctor Who" were warring with each other had no scruples.

How do we get to the point of a bright sunny day on a perfect farm? Well, if I told you that it would spoil the fun, and in the words of River Song from Doctor Who, "Spoilers!" However, know that it involves an Allosaur named Miffly, poison (occasionally), a couple of statues, and a possible sarcastic bastard of a soldier, or he just might be lonely. It's hard to tell.

This soldier narrator has an excellent reason to act the way he acts and do the things he does without compunction. In his saving the future and living it up as best as possible, he faces something that challenges everything. That is the exciting part.

One Day All This Will Be Yours is another brilliant science fiction novella in the sea of Tchaikovsky's deep and brilliant catalog. Tchaikovsky has proven in the last decade or so that he is a man who can write anything. Such as science fiction, as seen in his Children of Time series, where he eventually became known as the "spider guy." Walking in Aldebaran, where he smashes horror and science fiction, creating an existential take on madness. Or his huge epic Shadows of Apt series. A sprawling and immense epic story involving beings known as Kinden. You would be hard-pressed to find a story by Tchaikovsky that is not a great read. One Day This Will Be Yours, which takes the time-travel-gone-crazy trope and turns it on its ear, is another excellent read to add to his catalog.

Pacing and world-building wise, Tchaikovsky understands the fundamentals needed for a tight and gripping novella. Unlike regular novel lengthed stories, novellas have a stricter economy of words. You only get so many words to work with to create world-building, dialog, and character arc. It is the same constraint that short story writers deal with but to a more extreme extent. Some writers are good at this "dialed in" type of writing style, while other writers are very good at it. I would put Tchaikovsky in the latter group. I have read three of his novellas recently, and not in a single place did I ache for some part of story creation that was lacking. Readers loathe to branch out into novella and short story length stories because some writers struggle to pare their ideas down to the minimum word count with the maximum effect.

This problem isn't the case in One Day All This Will Be Yours.

The humor is wry and witty; the narrator's situations are hilarious and wild but do not stray into the ridiculous or uncomfortable. The pacing is quick, a must for a novella. And, the story overall is sweet in its own twisted way.

I loved this book, in case you can't tell. It will find a place of honor on my bookshelf and as a delightful reread in my future.

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!

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!

I have such a soft spot for sci fi short stories and novellas! "One Day All This Will Be Yours" is hilariously imagined and seriously entertaining. It had me giggling the entire time, but it held up that perfect sci fi undercurrent of dystopia without falling into cliches. I want to own a copy of this and a copy of "This is How You Lose the Time War" so I can set them next to each other on my shelves and re-read them both a million times. Where the latter is more literary, this story is more down-to-earth (but only slightly - you will, in fact, meet the character featured on the cover). I loved it, and like every good novella, it left me wanting more!

Tchaikovsky explores the wonders of time travel and being the ultimate loner in this new novella. There are very few sentient animals in this one but you wont mind because, as usual, the story is full of big ideas and "what if" moments. I am sure a careful and nit picky reader could find a few paradoxes with the time travel scenarios but I just took them at face value and enjoyed the wonderful prose like this:

“I’ve a specially curated selection of box sets, because one thing that spins like a weathervane when you change causality is entertainment, and if you have a deft hand you can collect all the really good versions of things, like the final series of Lost where all the loose ends actually got tied up, or that peculiarly tangled timeline where William Shakespeare, Helen Mirren and Orson Welles got together to make a Transformers movie.”

The only thing that stopped this from being a 5 star review is that the ending was quite abrubt and not fully fleshed out. I was definitely left wishing for more and a little disappointed.

I continue to be amazed at Tchaikovsky's wide range and proliferation of fantastic stories. Highly recommended.

This is a darkly funny scifi novella about a grumpy soldier who has survived a war that messed up time and causality throughout history. He came to the a point in time in the future far away from the time war and created a paradise. And he spents his time working to ensure that that kind of time travel could never damage time and causality again. Of course, all does not go to plan.

This book is a different take on the we-must-save-the-future version of a time travel story. Its a little self indulgent in its time travel related witticisms and references, but it's a quick enjoyable read if you're in the mood for it. If you can catch all the historical references, it will make it more fun, but even if you can't, I think it's still entertaining.

Tchaikovsky has packed a lot into this fairly short book. I'm not 100% sure of the accuracy of the science, but it's certainly an interesting concept. And there is a lovable monster pet! This story is unexpected, irreverent, dark, and weirdly romantic.

Thank you to @netgalley and @rebellionpublishing for an advanced e-copy of this novella!

You all are probably aware that Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my absolute favourite science fiction authors. I've only encountered one of his sci-fi novellas, Walking to Aldebaran, and absolutely loved it. So when I found out that he was coming out with a new one, I had to get my hands on it. One Day All This Will Be Yours is a darkly funny book that tackles the ethics of time travel and how far you'll go to stop humanity from breaking the world (again).

First of all, can I say how incredibly funny and clever this book is? Much like Walking to Aldebran, One Day All This Will Be Yours is filled with dark humour, sharp dialogue, and clever twists and turns that make it totally unputdownable. Tchaikovsky infuses our extremely grumpy main character with such a fantastic voice and you can't help but root for him (despite how awful he often is). These novellas with Solaris have been fabulous so far, and I really want to go back and read the rest of them!

I absolutely loved the concept of this book. A grumpy misanthropic veteran of a war that broke time creating a paradise for himself while stopping other time travellers from fucking up time again? Yes please. Time travel books usually make my head ache, but this one worked the concept of time travel and how we'd inevitably misuse it so incredibly well. The story has so many layers that I still find myself thinking about long after finishing the book. Plus. there's a dinosaur named Miffly in it. What's not to like?

I don't want to say too much about this book for fear of spoiling the experience, but trust me when I say that sci-fi fans don't want to miss out on this one. Tchaikovsky is one of the best sci-fi writers out there right now, and One Day All This Will Be Yours is proof.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Time Wars – clearly the Stars are no longer enough for us. Science Fiction loves the idea of epic conflict and the idea of Time itself being constantly rewritten opens up many ideas for stories. It’s a cornerstone of the new Doctor Who; comic companies like Marvel and DC have used his for many many many and indeed many reboots; while in fiction everyone from HG Wells to Bradbury and more recently El-Mohtar and Gladstone have explored what this would mean for humanity and now into that conversation Adrian Tchaikovsky in One Day All of This Will Be Yours has delivered a darkly humorous tale that explores the last survivor of the Time War who finds to their alarm that they aren’t the last one standing.

Our unnamed narrator is the survivor of the Causality War – the war that really ended all wars as it ended up breaking the entire space time continuum. After the viciousness of a war that led to constant re-writes of history and counter strikes by time travelling armies our Traveller decided after the last battle that enough was enough. Our Traveller finally found a home in one slice of remaining time to create the Perfect Day, have a farm and take a break from it all. On occasion sampling with the aid of the last remaining time machine any moment of remaining history that appeals be it to get new farm equipment from the Soviet Union or watching a Shakespearean play. The only fly in the ointment the occasional rogue time traveller from another fragment who strays into our Traveller’s land. Our Traveller doesn’t like to share, and this usually leads for the intruder to death by dinosaur and a re-write of history for their particular society to close that avenue of time travel down one highlight making Einstein give it all up for the Patent Office. All is going well until our Traveller is told he is not going to be the last human and instead will be the founder of a brand-new twee society.

If novels like This is How You Lose The Time War are the warm ray of hope then this is the decidedly British dash of cold water to make you shiver but delivered with a cheeky grin. On the face of it our Time Traveller is and they admit it a bit of a bastard. Having had enough of the endless war that has lasted lifetimes and removed their reliable memories of their previous life and family they are fairly ruthless in sharing existence with anyone else who may change what little they now have. But Tchaikovsky cleverly builds a character firstly who you like – they have a dry but wicked sense of humour and as the story progresses, we find out how bad this war was – our lead has some serious PTSD. We end up liking them and indeed when we find out what the Causality War actually involved it may indeed be hard to blame our narrator for a decision to get away from the human race. When potential new humans do arrive, they bring all the baggage of the past with them and does anyone really want to go through that again?

I’ll be vague on the other characters that we meet as that’s very much the fun of the story. But this a novel that does have love, fear, anger and regret in it while laughing in the face of time paradoxes. Tchaikovsky turns the mood on a sixpence so one moment we can be laughing at a Les Misérables time meddling joke and then sit in awe watching the collapse of the time space continuum or stare horror watching the end of the world. Tchaikovsky is using all the standards of time travel stories and there are some easter eggs for seasoned SF fans but even for a general reader there are laughs and thoughts a plenty. How can anyone refuse a tale with a feathered dinosaur called Miffly that eats one of the most evil dictators around?

Although this is a story with some cynicism and anger at the dark side of humanity that loves to destroy things for their own gain there is also a joy in being just human expressed. Putting aside wars for enjoying the experiences that humanity creates; possibly even making a connection with someone without knowing it or a deep-seated urge to stick two fingers up to authority fingers. In other words, this is a tale that manages to be both a lot of fun but also thoughtful and hopeful. Like our Time Traveller get comfy in a chair and have a perfect day reading this with the world outside switched off.

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 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.

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.

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!