ARC Review: One Day All This Would Be Yours, or a short and funny trip at the end of time!

Hello everyone! I hope you all are safe and happy, and that your week is going great. Here it was quite windy in the past days, and it was quite… exhausting, but this aside it seems like the week is not going bad for me, since I am here with my third review in a row! And okay, the fact that I am reading some ARCs, because I went on a spree on NetGalley could have helped here but… I am just glad to be back with some reviews!

Thanks to NetGalley and to the Editor. I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Title: One Day All This Will Be Yours
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Pages: 192
Publication Date: March, 2nd 2021

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.

To summarize my thoughts about this book I can say that this is a short book (or a “long” story) in which the author enjoys himself immensely. Sure, I cannot say that for sure, but while reading I had the impression that the author had some fun writing it. Mind me, this is not a complaint, at all. It was fun reading, with humor, satire, and some food for thoughts. And it is, also, a very quotable book, as you would see from this short review.

The more technical part, the one about time travel and causality war was a bit messy. I am not the biggest fan of time travel, so I usually don’t think too much about it, and about the paradox and the mere functioning of it all, so I am not the best judge, but I think that some things in there don’t really make too much sense if you seriously think about them. But there are so many other things you can take seriously in this book, even keeping in mind that is a really funny book, that I didn’t really mind.

I call it Causality War because causality was its biggest casualty. We were the time warriors, and we killed time.

And since I am talking about things that didn’t work so well for me, I would just talk a moment about the end. I know I have just started this review and I am going at things backward but since we are talking about my complaints I will go on! The ending, while not really bad, wasn’t really satisfying. It felt a bit rushed, I think that the length of the story doesn’t help here, and somehow lacking. It may be that I am a tad biased because I strongly prefer an ending that really ends, open ending is not a good thing in my book (sorry for the pun) and, even if there are exceptions, I am not usually a fan. So there is that, too, but I think that the author could have done better with its grand finale. 

And now we can proceed on the good parts.

One more perfect day at the end of the world.

There are two things that are the best in there. First thing first, our MC. This old and grumpy veteran is charming. So much so! And yes, there is the little downside of him being a killer, since he is hellbent on killing every one of the time travelers that arrive at his farm at the end of time. Because he elected himself as the gatekeeper of the future, and humans are not a thing in there. But nobody is perfect, and even if it may be a bit cold because killing poor travelers is not really the best option, well… In the end, you would not judge him so badly. And the second amazing thing about this book is Miffly, our MC’s pet. And okay, I am partial again because… Pets! What there is not to love with pets? But Miffly is a fluffy dinosaur!! She is an Allosaurus, and she is just so cute. 

[I had to…] explain that while T. rex is definitely one of the great iconic dinosaurs, for the purpose of eating people it’s severely suboptimal because, frankly, we’re far too small compared to its typical prey animals. Honestly, I’ve tried it; they’re just not interested in us. They’d be picking little human bones out of their teeth for days, and those tiny arms that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Whereas the Allosaurus, on the other hand, is decidedly closer to our scale. Still terrifyingly big, but a damn sight nippier and far more amenable to a human-sized snack.

And then we have some serious things. Because grumpy old killer and his dinosaur aside, this book is a critic of our world. We get climatic change, we get wars, we get some really bad sides of human nature. And even if it is quite a short book, I think that, on this respite, the author did a good job. Sometimes there is almost the feeling that things can become too much but nope, in the end, all is well balanced in there. And so we get to read something that is funny but also tragic in its fundamental truths.

It’s a lot like when we screwed the climate, to be honest. You never think you’re going to affect something as big as that. I mean, I’m just burning a little coal here, right? The planet’s very big, this piece of coal or cup of oil or forest of trees, it can’t be important in the grand scheme of things. A weird blind spot for a species all too happy to consider itself the centre of the universe in every other way.

So, I had a good time with this book. I cannot say that I loved it, because the time travel thing sometimes is a bit much, and I tend to prefer some less blatant critics. But this is just a minor thing. I smiled quite a lot while reading and I am glad to have finally read this one, both because I want to read more Tchaikovsky’s books and because this one, in particular, is something pretty unique. 

and half!

And what about you? Have you read this book? Or do you want to read it? Let me know!!

Happy reading!
S.