SciFi Novella Review: One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 2, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky:

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.