This book was an absolute blast. I'm not sure I've ever had more fun reading a book.
I do not say that lightly.
This felt like the literary equivalent of a good Will Ferrell movie. Or maybe the kind of movie that comes out when you’re in college, you watch it with a bunch of good friends and can’t breathe for laughing, and are quoting it endlessly to each other for the rest of your lives. (Super Troopers was the example for me, but I suspect the movie of choice varies greatly depending on when exactly you were born.) I need to get all of my friends to read this book right now so that we can spend years saying things like “let’s feed him to the allosaur!” and “Stalin vs Stalin!” and “I’m Caligula, get me out of here!” and laughing uproariously.
Anyway. Plot. The main character is the sole surviving veteran of the Causality War that left the entire timeline of the universe shattered. The war was fought with time machines, with all sides working to erase the other side from existence while stomping on just the right butterfly to usher in the unending Golden Age for their side. Except that pretty quickly becomes impossible when the side you are fighting for wasn’t destroyed so much as never existed in the first place, but you keep fighting and fighting because … what else can you do?
Our protagonist ends up setting a future bottleneck, after all the destruction, and makes it his mission to keep any and all time travelers from getting past him. Humanity did a great job of fucking up the past, he wasn’t going to let them fuck up the future. So he’s living an introvert’s dream, on his farm at the end of time with his faithful pet allosaurus Miffly. He spends his days intercepting time travelers attempting to reach the future, killing them, and then temporally backtracking them to their origin and making sure that no one then ever discovered time travel in the first place. When he’s bored, he goes and hangs out with Plato or Charlemagne or Rick Astley in the drifting fragments of time that remain.
This idyllic life is abruptly ended when he gets visitors not from the past, against which he stands unsleeping vigil, but from the future. His own descendants, it turns out, which raises all sorts of questions when you’re the very last human in several senses of the phrase. But damn it, he’s worked hard to make sure that humanity does not exist in the future, and he is NOT going to take this lying down, whatever his descendants might feel about it.
This is a novella, so it won’t take you long to read, and it’s worth every second. I really need to read more of Adrian Tchaikovsky.
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