Wild Time-Travel Adventures Ahead!

Adrian Tchaikovsky has quickly shown the depth of his imagination with a very impressive and imaginative range of novels; the epic steampunk Shadows of the Apt series, the reclaimed technology of the far-future in the Children of Time books, barbaric fantasy in the Echoes of the Fall trilogy, steampunk technology versus magic in Guns of the Dawn, ancient aliens battling enhanced humans in the Final Architecture Trilogy, a threat to alternate Earths in the new weird novel Doors of Eden and released in time for Christmas 2022, his latest; City of Last Chances where magic and industrial might meet in an imposing city. Amongst his collection of novellas is One Day All of This Will Be Yours, where once again he shows his excellent abilities to come up with different and gripping stories.
Here, the Casualty War ended everything, and a lone survivor lives a blissful existence at the end of time, just him and his menagerie of robotic assistants and one very faithful and vicious protector, - spending his days tending to his farm, jumping into the past to collect supplies, and dealing with survivors of the war and other time travellers who find their way here... until the appearance of one who changes everything.
One Day All of This Will Be Yours is a great read - and here listen, and we're treated to the author himself as the narrator, and his voice suits the task very well. One Day All of This Will Be Yours is a serious story but it carries with it a sense of humour that Adrian brings to the story better than another narrator would.
A brilliant tale for people looking for something different, for me it's perfect for a less-intense (but still fantastic) sci-fi listening sesh which would suit fans of the (excellent) Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

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Fantastic, a joy to listen to

I don't believe that anyone other than the author themselves could have performed this as effectively. Definitely a story and delivery that will be worth listening to several times.

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Timeosaur

A darkly comic time travel story from the talented Mr Adrian Tchaikovsky. This short story is full of dry, sarcastic humour and I enjoyed it immensely. It's the funniest book I've read by Tchaikovsky, despite the fact that the subject matter is actually pretty dark.

The basic premise is that a man has built a farmhouse at the end of time. He lives there alone, isolated from the rest of humanity in a landscape that is eternal and unchanging. His home is a full stop for the human race; here endeth history. Fortunately, stray time travellers occasionally stumble upon this end point to break up the monotony. Our hero is usually happy for the company, and after cooking his visitors a good meal, he murders them, usually by feeding them to his pet Allosaurus.

The story is told via a first person narrative, with the initial chapters focused on our hero's reasoning for his forced isolation and murderous tendancies. The gist of things is; humanity messed up the world and the past in a time war, and our hero is trying to protect what remains of human history. That's his rationale anyway, but things change when he gets a visit from the future, which should be impossible.

The plot is twisty and complex, with lots of time travel hijinks, philosophical pondering and a fair amount of violence. The contrast between the humour and more serious subject matter works well, and this would have been a deeply depressing book without it. Despite that, the ending is still a little dark and happens suddenly, but thematically I guess it makes sense.

One Day All This Will Be Yours is well worth checking out, even if some of the time travel logic might collapse under the smallest amount of scrutiny. It's the kind of creative, fun story I've come to expect from Tchaikovsky. It also has heart and even some melancholy, which is a hell of a lot to pack into a very short book. It would probably improve on rereading as there's so much to take in initially. I certainly wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from reading it more than once.

Audiobook - Tchaikovsky narrates this himself and does a bloody good job for the most part. His voice is well suited to our cynical, sarcastic hero, and he has good comic timing. The range of voices isn't brilliant and he's not a great actor, but I've heard much worse from author narrators.

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Excellent if Short

Summing this book up I would say it’s “a demented Dr Who with a touch of Mr and Mrs Smith, thrown in for good measure.” Witty, (“coming from a Utopia he, of course, has no idea what sprouts are”) sardonic, without upsetting any of the politically correct brigades. As a narrator, I find him marvellous to listen to. He perhaps doesn’t have the range of voices a professional has, but I prefer his English terms and phrases better than quite a number of his other audible books. The book itself is way too short. I would have loved it to have been longer. It deserved to be longer.

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A new genre: ascerbic time travel sci-fi

In this wickedly brief story we find an r/showerthoughts question taken to its most bizarre, hilarious, and forthright conclusion: If you were the last survivor of a war across time, what wouldn’t you do to preserve your own little slice of Eden?

While some of Tchaikovsky’s other series go on galactic-level space opera trilogies or rich fantasy dekalogies (yes I looked that up) this piece feels more personal, especially as it’s narrated by the author.

Ideal as a companion piece to Benedict Cumberpatch reading Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time”, as there are no Caligulan orgies in that one.

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Brilliant time travel dark comedy

Again Adrian Tchaikovsky proves himself a master of genre fiction. Here he plays with various time travel tropes with confidence. He also reads his work well.

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3 people found this helpful

Funny, inventive, caustic, well performed

Starts inventively with a fun and caustic tone , which continues all the way through.
Performed well, and one of the better audiobooks I’ve listened to this year.

Excellent all round - just a shame there isn’t more of it.

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I keep coming back

An unbelievably refreshing story with characters that can only be described as true.

That the author is the narrator means that all of the quirks of wording are emphasised as they were intended, which adds so much to the story that I now struggle to listen to any of his work that isn't read by him

I have now listened to this audiobook four times over the last year and I can't think of any better way of conveying how much I love it

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Very unusual

Part humour, part horrific and all sci-fi, this was an unexpected treat at the end of the year. I’ll be looking for more Tchaikovsky!

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An amusing book.

A great, intelligent and witty book. Well bear a second reading! Not a long book but delightful nonetheless!

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