one day all this will be yours by adrian tchaikovsky

I would go as far as call him a psychopath, but anyone who’d fought in a time war for endless iterations of said time would have to be. It’s brutal, it’s ruthless, and it’s very in character with our protagonist. His solution? Eliminate all the other time agents, then eliminate anyone who might ever invent a time travel machine. This is meaningless slaughter both of people and of the time continuum until one time agent realizes that time is already so irrevocably broken that fighting over it doesn’t make sense anymore. In some cases, they never even existed in the new present, because their parents never met or they died when they were a child. That just keep changing things and fighting each other through time because they have no present to come back to. So what you have left with in the aftermath of a time war is a bunch of time agents trying to fulfill the agenda of governments that don’t exist anymore, or have never existed, depending on the twists the time war took along the way. And if they are sent again to change it back because say another faction changed something in the past to suit their agenda… well, there is no guarantee that the change they make will bring back the same present they were born in. If someone was sent back in time to change the past, the present they come back to wouldn’t be like the one they left.

The story itself is quite an interesting take on time travel that I haven’t seen explored before, even though there is a certain logic to it. This was a delightful little novella and a very nice introduction to the author, as far as first impressions go.

One day all this will be yours by adrian tchaikovsky