Apparently, it’s Novella November! Who knew? Not me!

In any case, Novella November is a thing, and that means my timing is spot on, as I’ve been enjoying a few novellas this week.

Here’s a quick look at the first one I finished:

 

Title: One Day All This Will Be Yours
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Solaris
Publication date: March 2, 2021
Length: 144 pages
Genre: Science fiction
Source: Library
Rating:

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.

A totally trippy take on time travel and the end of the world. Our unnamed narrator is the sole survivor of the Causality War, in which too many competing factions realized that the ultimate weapon isn’t a nuke — it’s a time machine.

And then they used them, because that’s what you always do with the ultimate weapons that you swear you’ll never, ever use. You get your retaliation in first. Sooner or later, you preemptively deploy your deterrent just in case the other side aren’t deterred by it.

Don’t trust your adversaries? Go back in time and wipe out the pieces of their history that made them a threat in the first place. And once one set of people with a time machine realize its potential and actually use it, so does everyone else. It’s all very circular and paradoxical and made my head spin round quite a bit, but this book is oh-so-much fun to read.

I don’t want to give away any of the delightful little surprises, but trust me — you’ll want to experience the main character’s pillaging of the past for entertainment and farming supplies, his ruthless yet “nothing personal” approach to dealing with unwanted visitors, and his training of trusty sidekick Miffly.

The story is mind-bending and funny and plausible in the weirdest of ways, and the writing absolutely cracked me up.