One Day All This Will Be Yours

I'm generally not a fan of time-travel stories. In my view, it's one of the more overused and poorly-executed speculative-fiction concepts out there and even when done very well, there are only so many possible outcomes once it's employed in a narrative, so such stories ultimately end up feeling at least a bit samey to me. That said, I do appreciate the classics of the sub-genre, and sincere attempts to do something new and interesting with it. Thus, "One Day All This Will Be Yours" is one of the better stabs at such a thing I've experienced in a while, so I give it full marks for effort. It absolutely helps that it's a fairly short tale, which doesn't waste a lot of time, pun intended, getting to the details of its own unique premise and plot elements. It's also a "fun" story, with a fair amount of effective humor of various sorts that goes a long way toward making everything feel more cozy and engaging than the outright existential nightmare-fuel the experience would otherwise be. Unsurprisingly, the story ends up going in exactly one of the handful of ways it had to based on the setup but I still found the ride enjoyable and worthwhile, which is perhaps the best compliment I can pay it given my aforementioned bias against such tales. Yes, there are, I believe, valid "issues" a reader could certainly have with various aspects but at the end of the day, I'd say the positives significantly outweigh any negatives I could cite, so I'm inclined to just let them slide. In short, "One Day All This Will Be Yours" convincingly succeeds in my estimation because it's just as likely to work for fans of time-travel stories as for those who aren't, which is a rather impressive feat that I feel should be acknowledged and appreciated. Nicely done!

It's also worth noting that I did this one as an audiobook, read by the author, which I'd say meaningfully added to the experience as his delivery was quite good.

I borrowed this book from the library because it was short and has a picture of a dinosaur on the cover. It is, in fact, short, and has multiple dinosaurs in it.

I certainly have some problems with it, like its Eurocentric view of history or its tiresome equivocation of Stalin and Hitler; but its subject matter is treated so lightly that I can't be particularly upset. It is, at the end of the day, a relatively harmless & mostly enjoyable comedy overlaid on an interesting time travel premise.

Get off my lawn, and my lawn is the end of all time, says grandpa. A salty counterpoint to "This Is How You Lose the Time War".

Our nameless, faceless protagonist in this light-hearted post-epochalyptic tale has charged himself with protecting the future, so to speak. The past has been completely decimated in an endless series of time and causality wars. He will not only kill but erase anyone who threatens the future.

I went straight into this from Becky Chambers' Closed and Common Orbit and – talk about culture shock – the two could not have been more different. And I mean that in the best possible way (on both sides).

Chambers doesn't so much write novels as she does character studies in story format. This, on the other hand, isn't so much a novella as it is a philosophy/game theory/sociology textbook in story format.

If you enjoy stories that make you think, that leave you lying awake asking yourself how time works, this one's for you.

What an awesome book this was.
Really enjoyed reading it.
It shows the fucked-upness of time travel in a really tranquil way.

---

"The man’s name is Weldon. The woman’s is Smantha. “Samantha?” I clarify, but no, apparently it’s ‘Smantha.’ I’ve been invaded by chrononautic hipsters."