One Day All This Will Be Yours

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s One Day All This Will Be Yours begins at the end of time, where a lone man tends to his farm and his pet dinosaur. Or, more accurately, his fleet of robots tend to the farm. The man’s real job, it turns out, is to wait around for hapless, desperate time travelers to show up on his doorstep. This is where the time travelers always show up, you see, at time’s bottleneck, the farthest a time machine can take a person. The delightfully misanthropic main character (who remains nameless) cleans up his guest, plays host, feeds, entertains, learns what he can about the poor time traveler’s past… and then feeds said time traveler to the aforementioned pet dinosaur. As he puts it, “The place literally does run itself.”

Tchaikovsky’s latest work continues in the footsteps of his previous Solaris-published novellas, combining out-of-this-world setups with plenty of sharp wit and dark humor. The story evolves quickly, sending the reluctant main character on his own adventures through time and space, pestering ancient philosophers, attending legendary concerts, and arguing with himself in meetings. The book is mercifully light on technobabble, relying instead on bombastic scenarios to keep things moving. Science fiction fans are sure to blast through it in no time, laughing all the way.