One Day All This Will Be Yours: Signed Limited Edition

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