★★★★☆ One Day All This Will Be yours, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I have seen the future, and it is Twee!
One Day All This Will Be Yours
Adrian Tchaikovsky
I have seen the future, and it is Twee!
I am a devoted Science Fiction fan, and I am also a mathematician who has studied both quantum mechanics and general relativity. So I puff myself up as a connoisseur of time travel fiction. Thus, when I began Adrian Tchaikovsky's One Day All This Will Be Yours I immediately started trying to figure out which theories of time travel he was referencing. But it didn't really make any sense. Then, of course, it clicked -- "He's taking the piss!"
It's all a big joke, or a long series of them. And it's actually very funny! I won't give away any of the jokes, but I will say that I particularly enjoyed the relationship between our first-person narrator (FPN) and Zoe, whose relationship to FPN I could barely characterize, even if I weren't trying to avoid spoilers.
This was, I think, the most amusing thing by Tchaikovsky I have ever read. Not his best -- I would award that prize to Children of Time. (Yay spiders!) But it's short and truly funny, at least if you're me, and your idea of a good time is a send-up of time travel and cruel mockery of popular romance tropes.