One Day All This Will Be Yours

Starred review from January 11, 2021
Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Tchaikovsky (Children of Time) makes the end of the world a personal affair in this humorous, sharp-edged novel. The unnamed narrator is the last temporal warrior to survive the Causality War, fought via the manipulation of time, and live into the end times, or, as he terms it, the “postepochalypse.” Now he guards the edge of undamaged time from any other time travelers, as their existence threatens to trigger the war anew. He efficiently dispatches Greek philosophers (“half-naked and half in bedsheets”) and works to remedy the parts of history that would enable time travel, including the invention of trigonometry (“to the great joy of schoolchildren everywhere”)—but his own existence is thrown into question when travelers from a future he believed to be uninhabited travel back in time to meet him, hailing him as the founder of their utopian society. Among them is Zoe, a woman destined to cofound this new world—but who, it turns out, is a murder-minded rebel with no interest in working to bring about a future she despises. Balancing the bitter with the playful, Tchaikovsky carefully probes the psychological pressure of being an agent lost among the shards of shattered time. This time-looped dramedy is as funny as it is thought-provoking. Agent: Simon Kavanagh, Mic Cheetham Agency.