...it’s horrible out there, in history. It always was, even before we shattered it to bits. It’s full of war and plague, starvation, intolerance and misery. [loc. 529]
A cheerful tale of the postepochalypse, narrated by an unnamed veteran of the Causality War, which destroyed time itself. Our narrator is determined to maintain world peace forever, despite the many visitors he receives -- time travellers like himself, trying to see how far forward they can travel, who reach 'this last perfect day before the rest of time happens'.
Our narrator is not in favour of time travel, despite the many pleasures of messing around with time: Wordsworth writing about trilobites instead of daffodils, 'that peculiarly tangled timeline where William Shakespeare, Helen Mirren and Orson Welles got together to make a Transformers movie', meeting notable figures from history, and acquiring exotic pets. Miffly is an absolute delight, especially when she chases Hitler round a field. (Allosaurs can run faster than Hitlers.)
There is also a delightful enemies-to-lovers / arranged marriage romance, some splendid genre in-jokes ('a mint-in-box set of Ticket to Ride, the rare Hutchinson Games edition from where Europe split into a thousand different states'; a meeting highly reminiscent of 'All You Zombies'; a Wellsian chap with an excellent moustache), and, beneath the snark and cynicism, a profoundly damaged and melancholy character.
I find Tchaikovsky something of a Marmite author: I certainly don't love everything he's written, and have been disappointed in the past. This was the opposite of disappointment, though, a novella that I enjoyed much more than I'd expected, and shall read again when I need an appealing villain and a playful plot.
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