Until travellers from the actual, future, future turn up on his porch and call him Gramps. And so now, at the end of times, in the one stable point of a glorious indeterminate amount of time, our protagonist treasure hunts the sharp shards of the past, gathering farming equipment, growing veggies and killing random time travellers who inexorably land in his garden, in the farthest possible future. It was still salvageable, more or less – until Causality bombs destroyed the substance of time. With the onset of time travel rewriting the past became the favorite pastime of governments and agencies, and all the innumerable, contradictory changes to the history carried out by time soldiers resulted in shattering the past and erasing the present. You see, in Causality Wars the unnamed protagonist is the veteran of the humanity – and history – ceased to exist. It’s funny, it’s rabid, it’s sarcastic – but most of all, it’s to the point. After all, one can become too thinly spread, “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread,” even without One Ring (unless you want to confess, Mr Tchaikovsky?) I needn’t have worried, tough – this novella is short and sharp and scathing, with long pointed teeth and unrelenting snarkiness that brings to mind the best that stand-up comedy has to offer.Īnd this novella is indeed written very much in the style of stand-up comedy, with the protagonist wound up to the extreme, never shutting up, venting his anger and misanthropy in an unceasing torrent of words. After a couple of disappointing books by Tchaikovsky I approached this novella with certain trepidation.
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