book review this is how you lose the time war

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal el-mohtar , max gladstone.

209 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 16, 2019

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‘ In the war they wage through time, what lasting advantage comes from murdering ghosts, who, with a slight shift of threads, will return to life or live different lives that never bright them to the executioner’s blade?...No death sticks but the one that matters. ’

And we’ll run again, the two of us, upthread and down, firefighter and fire starter, two predators only sated by each other’s words.

Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you. Red

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.

..."Red's letters were written entirely by Gladstone, and Blue's by El-Mohtar; although they wrote a general outline beforehand, "the reactions of each character were developed with a genuine element of surprise on receiving each letter, and the scenes accompanying [the letters] were written using that emotional response"."

I want to meet you in every place I have loved.

So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden's, not your mission's, but yours, alone.

It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means. But enough philosophy.

We make so much of lettercraft literal, don’t we? Whacked seals aside. Letters as time travel, time-travelling letters. Hidden meanings. I wonder what you see me saying here.

I veer rhapsodic; my prose purples.

Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying. I wanted to say, I want to make you tea to drink , but didn’t, and you wrote to me of doing so; I wanted to say, your letter lives inside me in the most literal way possible , but didn’t, and you wrote to me of structures and events. I wanted to say, words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing, a thing that is more than one Shift .

Do you laugh, sea foam? Do you smile, ice, and observe your triumph with an angel’s remove? Sapphire-flamed phoenix, risen, do you command me once again to look upon your works and despair?

PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.

You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, time.

“She climbs upthread and down; she braids and unbraids history’s hair. Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay’s shriek. She collects blues and keeps them. When she is sure no one is watching, she rereads the letters she’s carved into herself.”

“It's amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You're different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”

“So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone. I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still, I suspect you will appreciate the token.”

“You’ve whetted me like a stone. I feel almost invincible in our battles’ wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here.”

“I sought loneliness when I was young. You’ve seen me there: on my promontory, patient and unaware. But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

“I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.”

I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you. ... I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.

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This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone || Book Review

If there is one book that has interesting reviews online, it is This is How You Lose the Time War . Prior to reading the book, all I knew about it was that it is about time travelling and people love it even though they didn't understand the book.

I finally read it in January with my book club and I have to say: it was hella captivating. You will see many quotes in this post because I annotated a lot and also a spoiler-filled section later because I HAVE to share what I felt when reading the book.

This is How You Lose the Time War synopsis

Discussion with spoilers, let's chat.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads:  Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That's how war works. Right?

Content warnings: Animal killing, Gore, Rape (mentioned), Self-harm, Suicide (mentioned), Torture, War/Violence

Since it was a group read, I read it only on readalong calls with other club members every weekend. If I had read it alone, I would have probably finished it in one sitting instead of three Saturdays.

This is How You Lose the Time War drops us right into the story with no explanation or warning and goes from there. The reader has to read multiple chapters to understand what is going on and even then they might be confused.

I felt like I had a proper grasp of the book only about 50% into it. Since I had not read the actual synopsis, I had zero comprehension of the story in the beginning. My understanding grew very slowly in comparison to the pace of the story. But once things started clicking properly in my head, I was enthralled by the book.

Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.

The story is fast paced from the start. After we're dropped in, the book does not wait for us to understand before picking up the speed. It makes for some interesting chapters (or the entire book) while we are confused about what is going on.

As someone who doesn't like slow-paced stories, this was right up my street. Towards the end, I couldn't read it fast enough and didn't take a pause. I wanted to know what happens next and next and next.

The time travel aspect did not disappoint. The two main characters travel upthread (back in time) and downthread (forward in time) to make small changes which create big impacts because of the butterfly effect. It was really interesting to see them jump "strands", compare the different strands of time, and make waves.

With every time travelling story, I want one big twist or revelation. There are so many opportunities with time travelling. This book took the opportunity and had a really good twist at the end . It took a fact that was quietly intriguing throughout the story and made it into a huge thing. All of the hints fit together perfectly. I GASPED.

The book had me in a chokehold, basically.

Hope may be a dream. But she will fight to make it real.

A great book has to have great characters and This is How You Lose the Time War had the perfect protagonists. Red and Blue are time travelling agents in rival companies. Neither of them are human but they often take human-like bodies. They travel in time and make waves in order to deliver what their agencies want, but they also sabotage moves made by the rival agency.

Red and Blue are one of the most talented in their respective agencies and their paths cross often. They start sabotaging and taunting each other, leaving creative letters which lead to more. I didn't know that there was romance in the book so when the hints came, my book club had to confirm it for me. This book was impressing me more and more as I read it.

The relationship development between Red and Blue was slow, entertaining, and full of yearning. This book delivered a brilliant sapphic enemies/rivals to lovers romance. It was awesome to see them pretending to be enemies and being super talented at their job while writing letters FULL of pining. I was annotating heavily towards the end.

To read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrage and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.

The interesting thing about the characters and the romance is that the characters are not really women so it's a "sapphic" romance only because they use she/her pronouns . Red and Blue definitely don't take on heteronormative roles in their relationship as well. Some parts of their personality do make them butch and femme but they're in a dimension of their own.

They also upstage the heteronormative time travelling romance trope that we generally see. Red and Blue sabotage each other and come up with very inventive ways of sending/reading letters. I looked forward to seeing what they do in every chapter. At the end, after the twist, everything cranks up and we truly see the depth of what time travelling can do. It was amazing.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a book that I will remember and need to reread now that I have a better understanding. The story, the characters, and the writing will keep me awake on random nights for years to come.

It is only around 200 pages but packs a ton. I highly recommend it because I believe it is one of the best romance books . Whether you understand the plot or not, you will enjoy the story.

If you haven't read the book and don't want to be spoiled, don't read this section! Click here to skip to the bottom of this post.

I generally don't have spoiler sections for book reviews like my KDrama reviews but I have to include it here because I want to talk about that ending. The last third of the book was a crescendo. It amped up the yearning and the brilliance in both Blue and Red.

Just in case you're not on the same page as me, here's the ending explained along with my thoughts:

After Blue dies from the poison created by Red and her faction, Red basically loses herself in grief. One day, she comes upon a painting which shows the scenario of Blue's death almost exactly as it happened. The difference is the missing poison, letter, and the being in the painting has red hair.

Red remembers bits of Blue's letters and remembers that the poison was tailored for Blue's faction and wouldn't have any affect on Red and her fellow agents. She also remembers that while Garden shelters its agents as they grow up, there was an incident during Blue's former years due to which there was a hole in her brain. A hole which can be used.

Blue, as a complete Garden agent, cannot survive the poison. And Red cannot enter Garden's areas because she does not have Garden's genetic make up. But they have scattered pieces of themselves in time through their ingenious letters.

A letter is more than text. She reads Blue into her: tears, breath, skin—most of these traces were scrubbed away, but a few remain. She builds a model of Blue's mind from the words she left; she molds her body to the letters' measure. Almost.

Taking the wild chance, Red travels upthread (back in time) and retraces her own footsteps. The end of chapter 22 says "then she climbs up and goes seeking." Red is the Seeker whom we've been seeing and wondering about until now. This was when I gasped. The revelation blew my mind.

After Past Red and Past Blue read and disposed of the letters, Red/the Seeker collects the pieces. She eats and absorbs pieces of Blue's letters because Blue's letters contain parts of Blue, and hence, parts of the Garden genetic make up.

When Past Red caught onto someone following her and thought it was the Commandment having her followed, it was actually her future self. Red laid traps for herself and later fell into her own traps, she fought herself in the shadows, and felt paranoid because of herself. Seeker Red also tries to reach out to her past self but can't reveal herself without tainting past experiences, and hence Past Red thinks she's in danger.

Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation.

I was shocked by the news and what it meant for all the points until then. But if you think about it, it was obvious in a way. No one except Blue was as talented as Red and hence no one else could have followed Red through everything. No one else knows Red intimately and can keep up with her travel. In hindsight, it is clear. But I didn't even consider it as the possible outcome before.

The best part is how brilliantly Blue was written. There were hints all along of Blue subtly planting this idea in Red's mind. As Seeker Red snatches up all of Blue's letters, she reads them again and finds clues. How long ago had Blue planned it? She was never going to kill Red.

The fact that we got reveals which altered our perception of whatever happened and, at the same time, watch Red get reveals which alter her perception of everything so far was mindblowing. The plot and the writing played out so well in chapter 23.

Red may be bad, but to die for madness is to die for something.

Red becomes Blue, basically. Or a mixture of herself and Blue. She enters Garden "as a letter, sealed in Blue" and finds young Blue. Red gives Blue a taste of the poison which would be used far into the future and also some of herself that is resistant to the poison. Red essentially vaccinates Blue against the poison she created.

Reading that scene was like reorienting everything I knew about the story. And that, my friends, is what a makes a great time travel story. While the revelation about Red did come somewhat linear in time, where she was herself and then later becomes something else, Blue was different from the start. Or you could say that she changed at the end only for everything from the beginning to be changed.

So. Blue, in the end, survived because a part of her was Red. Both Blue and Red are "tainted" now, both between two polar opposite things. When Red got out of Garden and was captured by her Agency, Blue got her out with—of course—a letter. The book ends with them deciding to fight together against both their factions. They will face their biggest challenge and have fun.

Shall we prick and twist and play the braid until it yields us a place downthread, ned the fork of our Shifts into a double helix around our base pair? Shall we build a bridge between our Shifts and hold it—a space in which to be neighbours, to keep dogs, share tea?

Have you read This is How You Lose the Time War ? If yes, what did you think of the book? What did you think of the title in relation to the story (and the ending)?

If not, have I convinced you to give the book a chance?

Sumedha spends her days reading books, bingeing Kdramas, drawing illustrations, and blogging while listening to Lo-Fi music. Read more ➔

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26 comments

as a non native English speaker this book was really confusing with the purple prose. the only ending i could grasp was both of them fighting together. I didn't even know blue died (though i know red did give her poison) and red saved her even though i read the book full. this book was really really confusing for me. but some parts of it i really liked. some parts really devastated me

ah i can see how it would be hard for a non native speaker! it is written in a confusing manner for everybody, to be honest.

Thank you for the enduring explanation! I thought I had it, but needed to confirm. Confusing but worth it!

Glad to help!

This is definitely a future read for me but I thinking more I just need to grab it and binge in between planned reads.

In whatever way, read it read it read it!

oh man I once had a time-crossed lover WIP so it's super exciting to hear about a book doing time travel well!! awesome review

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Book Reviews

Letters serve to bond time-traveling rivals in 'this is how you lose the time war'.

Jason Sheehan

This is How You Lose the Time War

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The problem with time-travel stories is the haywire factor: Their tendency (almost guaranteed) to, at some point, just go completely off the rails.

See, there's an in-built suicide switch in a time-travel story that's endemic to the form. Because once you start messing with timelines and alternate, competing realities, you're decoupling effect from cause, removing consequence from action. And once you do that, narrative structure, like a doughnut in hot coffee, just falls all to pieces.

The epistolary novel, too, has a genetic defect that often (read: nearly always) cripples it. Like one of those shaky little dogs incapable of surviving in any environment less sheltered than a rich lady's purse, the novel of letters is so deliberately narrow in focus (two people having a single, extended conversation, spoken only in complete thoughts, paragraphs, postscripts, arrhythmic with lag between statement and response) that it can only traditionally exist in the hothouse environment of passionate, thwarted love or, occasionally, prison.

But what if someone wrote a time-travel story that made the uncoupling and haywire craziness the entire point? And what if you could ground all that crazy in the simple, pure yearning of two lovers separated by the streams of space and time, passing letters to each other across the chaos?

Well, you'd have The Lake House , of course. But if you took that sappy story of unrequited love, Keanu Reeves and a time-traveling mailbox, strapped it up in body armor, covered it with razors, dipped it in poison and set it loose to murder and burn its way across worlds and centuries, what you'd end up with is This Is How You Lose The Time War , the experimental, collaborative, time-travelling love-and-genocide novel by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

What you'd have are Red and Blue: Two agents working for opposing sides in a time war that has raged across a thousand realities, through all of time. They are soldiers. Spies. Deep-cover operatives playing their parts in a long-game battle for control over the future. One comes from a distant technological utopia. The other from a verdant hippie-elf tomorrow where everyone is part of some kind of tree-based hive-consciousness. They have lived hundreds of lifetimes apiece, Red and Blue. Won some and lost some. Each is the apex predator of their kind. Each, alternately, the perfect prey.

And their relationship begins with a letter left in the ashes of a dying world circling some distant star. With blood in her hair, last woman standing on a battlefield full of corpses, Red finds a letter that says simply, "Burn Before Reading." She knows it's dangerous. She knows she shouldn't even look. But she does anyway.

Taunts. Challenges. Threats. That's where Red and Blue start. When they win, they want someone to brag to. A nose to rub it in. So in the patterns of boiling water, sketched in a lava flow, grown into the living rings of a tree cut down by Genghis Khan's armies is where they leave their messages to each other. They cross paths in Atlantis, in a steampunk-y London, in ancient temples and a Stalingrad full of Nazi zombies, never meeting, never seeing anything but traces of each other (because time travel, you know?). But they are connected by the letters. By sharing their hungers, their weariness, their fears. Who else could understand? Who would've lived long enough, fought hard enough, to have seen 30 different Atlantises all meet their ends in 30 different timelines?

They fall in love by degrees, a word at a time. They risk their lives and positions and power because what they are doing is betrayal of the highest order. What one side wouldn't give for a woman on the inside, after all. For an agent of the enemy to turn.

El-Mohtar, who is an NPR contributor, and Gladstone sidestep the pitfall of the time-travel story by leaning way into the chaos of it all. They embrace the inexplicable convolutions of narrative rendered by bending time's arrow and make each chapter a vignette — a specific time, place, moment, detailing starship battles or coastal fishing villages where subtle, long games are played to shape the course of the future. But they don't traffic in the how or the why. There is no larger picture here. No grand design revealed. Red and Blue are soldiers. They go where they are told by their commanders. They do the terrible things they are born to do and don't ask questions.

But in between, the letters — snarky, sappy, desperate, heartfelt and dangerous. El-Mohtar and Gladstone's voices as Red and Blue are dissimilar enough to give each a flavor, yet enough alike that there's an almost alien sense of dislocation about them. Each writes like they have seen the beginning and the end of time and everything in between. Like they are absolutely exhausted by it, but suddenly, slowly, carefully wakening into this impossible connection. This love which, if discovered, will get them both killed.

And the thrill of This Is How You Lose The Time War suddenly becomes not the time travel, not the war, not any of those things that no one could ever describe anyway, but just the connection between two lonely professional killers with the ability to inscribe letters on lava. After a thousand lifetimes spent fighting, the coalescent story becomes about how to finally stop. In a complicated universe where anything done can be undone before it ever happened, all that matters is simply finding a way to be together.

No matter the consequences.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers . He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

• time travel
• amal el mohtar
• max gladstone
• this is how you lose the time war

Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Book Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War , by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

February 1, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

Time travel and related plot devices (alternative histories, garden-of-forking-path plots, Rip van Winkles, the lot) rely on such hoary old (!) science-fiction tropes that you’d think the whole sub-genre just about wrung out by now… except .

Except that the mechanics — how does it work , exactly? how does one keep the story from tripping over its own feet? — the mechanics seem to offer so many extraordinary challenges; except that by definition they play with some of the things most precious to human beings: family (the kill-your-grandfather paradoxes), memory (once you’ve changed the past, can you still remember it?), destiny (must it always happen the same way?)…

Furthermore, SF authors — also sort of by definition — are an inventive, imaginative lot. They revel in their own smarts, not without reason. As a result, they’re disproportionately drawn to seeming impossibilities, often seeking to ratchet up or, just as often, to so cleverly hand-wave away the difficulties that we don’t notice. And if they’re good enough at their job, we don’t even want to notice the absence of explanation.

How to Lose the Time War falls into that category of time-travel stories which simply accept that the impossible has at some point become possible, without dwelling on the how . (In a way, these books say, how could a present-day author even hope to explain the mechanics? The sheer impossibility of taking a step back to a minute ago — undoing the deed, unsaying the said, undotting the i — surely such a thing could be accessible only to a humanity so far advanced beyond our own that we could never understand how it works, let alone comprehend how the world as we know it could continue to exist.) As early as its third paragraph — after a couple of brief, scene-setting opener sentences — the book shows what it will ask of us. The “she” here is known only as Red:

That was fun , she thinks, but the thought sours in the framing. It was clean, at least. Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agency’s arranged—the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible. She’s come to knot this strand of history and sear it until it melts.

So then the concept of time in this story seems simple: threads — strands — which Red can somehow “climb.” She goes up the thread to get to the past, and presumably down to head in the other, future-ward direction. Red herself serves someone or something called an “Agency.” And her mission has something to do with securing a moment in history to prevent further unraveling, to ensure that nothing will happen right here whose outcome will be a future in which the Agency and Red herself don’t exist…

So the general shape of things isn’t hard to make out. Few details so far — how does she “climb,” how does she “knot” a moment, and how “sear” it once knotted? But it’s so early in the book that we just relax, confident that the blurry outline suggested here will be etched in later.

Which, well, doesn’t really happen. For This Is How You Lose the Time War is one of those science-fiction works in which impossible (to our eyes) technology simply has come to be possible, in ways we’d never understand even if carefully explained. It’s told, in other words, from the point of view of inhabitants of such a future : people who’ve lived for so long with a form of technology that they themselves mostly don’t think of the “how” much at all. They just do it.

Consider: if the “now” which you and I actually inhabit were Victorian England, and we set out to tell of certain events from the point of view of a 21st-century writer/reader of English, realistically speaking it would need no explanations either. It might be useful — atmospherically, stylistically — to describe the click of a laptop’s keyboard, the spray of electrons on a screen, the soft herky-jerky rocking of a natural-gas-powered commuter bus, the absorption of the bus’s occupants in the small glowing objects in the palms of their hands. But if we tried to explain how it all worked, we’d never get to the story . And yet it would all make sense from the point of view of the 21st-century protagonist , even if not from that of its readers.

By the way, the notion of a “time war” didn’t originate with this book. If you’ve watched much of the Doctor Who television program, even back in its earliest form in the 1960s, you’ve many times encountered the term and what it must represent: both sides in the war can move around into the past and back to the future, and can use that ability to repeatedly wipe each other out and to undo one wiping-out only to have the undoing itself undone…

But really, This Is How You Lose the Time War is not a conventional time-travel story. It’s not a stereotypical war story, either. It is both of those things to some extent, but mostly it’s a love story. In short, Red develops a deep mutual fascination with, and ultimately love for, her chief antagonist in the war: an enemy agent named (yes) Blue.

Blue, like Red, moves around freely in time and space. Like Red, she excels at her work, and has been at it for a long time. Like Red, Blue recognizes and remembers each thread of history, clambers up into the past and down into the future with the intention of foiling her adversary — her favorite adversary — using whatever means might lie at hand.

But while Red seems to — and mostly does — anchor the story’s point of view, it is Blue who initiates contact. It comes in the form of a letter which Red finds — a letter which “does not belong,” lying on a battlefield strewn with corpses and wreckage:

There should not be a sheet of cream-colored paper, clean save for a single line in a long, trailing hand: Burn before reading .

This letter is not a love letter; it is, as Red recognizes, a trap, a taunt, from the only person who could possibly have come up with and executed such a diabolical twist in their dance through millennia…

We get to read the letter, and we get to read the other letters that follow from both Blue and Red, back and forth, letters in which the subjects gradually (and convincingly, to my mind) shift from war and tactics to longing and passion.

Each chapter, you see, consists of two parts: a regular narrative — Character A does and feels thus-and-such — followed by a letter from B to A, a commentary on what has just happened to A, or on what A has just done. This is a nifty time-travel plot device in its own right: in order to compose such a letter, the events discussed have to have occurred in the letter-writer’s past; but in order for the addressee to find the letter, it must be planted in the addressee’s past — by someone from her future.

Anyone who’s ever been caught up in the heady rhythm of an intense epistolary relationship will recognize the shift in tone from sarcastic jeering, to more gentle teasing and virtual eyerolls and smiles, to laughter with instead of at the other, and so on, all the way to the hunger — Why haven’t they replied yet? — and ultimately interdependence on each other. All of which, in Red and Blue’s case, must occur against a dangerous backdrop, one in which they must remain convincingly “opponents,” ones known to each’s superiors and colleagues. (And of course, if the relationship is found out, all those superiors and colleagues are perfectly capable of scuttling the whole thing using the same upthread/downthread means.) They cannot even meet face-to-face, but must contrive ways to avoid each other even while managing to intersect each other’s path: to leave not just letters for the other, but gifts , however oblique, even as they enact their agencies’ plans to make each other impossible…

I will say I found the conclusion of This Is How You Lose the Time War terrific: surprising, ingenious, and thrillingly right . It puts a nice sharp little point on the title, too: in order for a “you” to lose a war, any war, a different “you” almost certainly wins . Just take a look at the cover — not a glance, but a real look: yes, a red and a blue bird stand in profile on it; but each profile is sliced into sections slightly displaced from those adjacent to it.

That’s Red, all right, and that’s Blue, too: antagonists juddering together through time into a future just different enough to make the whole thing work.

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Book Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Talia Franks Book Review fiction , lgbtqia+ , novella , Science Fiction , time travel 0

Usually, I hate being confused, but This Is How You Lose the Time War is such a good book that honestly, I didn’t much mind. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone did a bang-up job in making me emotionally invested in both Red and Blue, two agents pitted against each other in a seemingly endless war across times and realities. Discovering how their world(s) work is part of the fun of the book, so I won’t give too much away, but I will say that I appreciated how the characters casually discussed traveling to and from different worlds, and different versions of those worlds. Moreover, the delicate balance that the worlds are held in, dependent on the different ways that time is interpreted, are as dexterous as they are dynamic. 

I can safely say that I’ve never read a book that caught me and drew me in quite like This Is How You Lose the Time War . Short though it is, this novella lasted both forever and only an instant, packing depth and intrigue into its pressed pages, with not a word wasted and no corners cut. This Is How You Lose the Time War is the kind of book that I want to simultaneously recommend to everyone and also hold close to my chest, keeping the story personal to myself for just a little longer as I marvel at the intricacy of the prose. 

Perhaps I’m getting a little flowery here, but this book is just so weird and brilliant in ways that I’m not quite sure how to describe. I completely loved it, and I do think that This Is How You Lose the Time War is the kind of book that will stand the test of, and indeed requires and near demands, many returning reads.

One thing that I particularly appreciated about this book with regard to inclusion is that while the main characters, who are both at war and in love with one another, are both gendered as female throughout the text it’s made clear that this is a personal preference for them. That is to say, the flexibility of the worlds in which they exist is such that gender’s only real importance is functional and arbitrary besides. At no point in the text is the gender of either character anything but an afterthought, as there is nothing that they need to overcome because of it. There are much bigger obstacles stopping the main characters from being together, which overwhelm the plot. As much as I love books that tackle the issues that are brought up by being in relationships that fall outside of the heteronormative realm, it was refreshing to read a book that treated such a relationship as unmarked, rather than as a departure from the norm.

The way that this text is structured and the role of language in the narrative is also fascinating to me. Each vignette opens with either Red or Blue on some kind of mission, and at some point throughout the scene they encounter an object that acts as a coded letter to the other. The way that the letters are coded varies—some burn, some are eaten as seeds. Reading most definitely stretched, yet never managed to break, my imagination, such was the detail with which El-Mohtar and Gladstone poured into the text. The immediately following section is the letter itself, before repeating the structure from the perspective of the alternate protagonist.

All told, this book was a thrilling, invigorating read, and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment I spent between the pages. There is a part of me that wishes it was longer, but at the same time, This Is How You Lose the Time War is the kind of book that exists at the perfect length, where any more would actually be too much of a good thing. I was perfectly happy with where things ended (or began, if you take a certain view.)

Happy reading!

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a bookish blog by twins Anna & Alexis

Review: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Anna: What would you do for love?

This is How You Lose the Time War is the most imaginative book I’ve read in a long time. It reminded me why sci-fi  is such an amazing genre that I need to explore more. It also has LGBTQ+ rep!

Summary: Red and Blue are change agents who work for rival time traveling agencies–Blue for the Garden, a vast organic consciousness. Red works for the Agency, a Technotopia. While traveling to different “strands” of history and time to change history, they start to write each other letters and slowly fall in love.

The actual rules and word building in This is How You Lose the Time War is super confusing at first and very slowly revealed to the reader. I didn’t know what was going on for a while, but that’s okay. This book is more about the lyrical writing and the vivid, visceral images of time traveling and Red and Blue’s romance that literally stands the test of time. This is ultimately a “star-crossed” lovers narrative, but it’s not tropey at all. This book takes work to get through, but it’s rewarding and worth it.

I also think it’s so cool that this book was co-written! As a writer, I can’t imagine creating such a complex world and story in the first place, but also doing it so seamlessly with another writer.

Verdict: 4 stars

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Published by Anna and Alexis

Hello! We're Anna and Alexis, twins from the Richmond, Virginia area. We both studied English and creative writing in college. Anna spent a year after college working in book publishing in New York City. After living outside of D.C., she moved back to the Richmond area. She works in marketing. Her favorite genre to read is literary fiction, especially by female authors, and she also enjoys dystopian novels. Alexis works in marketing and writes novels on the side. She recently finished grad school, where she received her MFA in creative writing. She loves reading fantasy, especially YA, magical realism, and the occasional lyrical fiction and romance. We’ve been reading and writing together as long as we can remember, and we’re excited to share our bookish thoughts with you! Check us out on Instagram @takestwotobookreview. View all posts by Anna and Alexis

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Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

Liz Bourke and Amy Goldschlager Review This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

A novel – or rather a novella – that does find me part of its enthusiastic readership is Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone’s first tra­ditionally published collaboration, This Is How You Lose the Time War . Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. This is the time-travelling queer epistolary romance I didn’t know I needed. This is the time-travelling queer epistolary romance you should definitely read, because while I’m not entirely sure I can do it justice in a review, I am entirely sure it’s an excellent work that – if there’s any justice in the world – we’ll see on awards lists next year.

El-Mohtar (Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of “Seasons of Glass and Iron”) and Gladstone (award-nominated author of Ruin of Angels and Empress of Forever ) have combined their striking talents in a slender volume that’s as impressive and as affecting as it is brief. It starts with a letter marked “burn before reading.” Out of this unlikely beginning arises a correspondence that should never have existed, between two agents on the opposite sides of a war that stretches throughout time and space: rivals who know each other by their work. Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technological civilisation. Blue belongs to the Garden, a consciousness embedded in organic matter. They have bloody histories and they’re bent on futures where the other is dead, defeated, or never-to-have-existed at all. They have nothing in common.

They have a lot in common. They’re the best at what they do. They’re alone. They want to win – but they also want to be seen by someone who can understand and appreciate what they have done and can do: they want the acknowledge­ment of knowing the best of the other side knows they’re better.

At first. It starts as a game. It starts as a battle­field boast. It grows into something stranger, stronger, fiercer, something that can say,

I want to scorch the thousand earths be­tween us to see what blooms from the ash, so we can discover it hand in hand, content in context, intelligible only to each other. I want to meet you in every place I have loved… …I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.

It’s an epistolary romance between spies. Of course there’s betrayal, heart-breaking betrayal, one used against the other; of course there’s striving, there are reversals, there’s unexpected triumph, bitter and sweet and hopeful. Glad­stone and El-Mohtar between them have built a precisely engineered marvel, cresting to a climax that takes every moment of what came before and infuses it with fresh meaning, gives it more layers.

I often dislike time travel stories. Paradox annoys me. Here the paradox is elegant and in­evitable, as inevitable as tragedy but better . Here the paradox is the point, and it turns out that it’s a glorious thing.

With precise, cut-glass prose – poetic and pragmatic at once – deeply compelling charac­ters, and a tensely rewarding conclusion, This Is How You Lose the Time War is one of the most striking works of fiction I’ve read this decade. I’m going to be thinking about it – returning to it – for months, at least. Read it, because I can’t recommend it highly enough.

– Liz Bourke

This review and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus .

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters , a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog , her Patreon , or Twitter . She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign .

Who does not love an epistolary novel? Who does not love an epistolary novel where each end of the correspondence is written by a different author? Who does not love an audiobook production of a two-authored epistolary novel in which each cor­respondent is voiced by a separate narrator? If you are not sharing in this love, I do not want to know you. The steely but passionate voice of Cynthia Farrell enacts the role of Red, an elite operative of the Agency, an organization from a highly technological potential distant future; Emily Woo Zeller is her opposite number, taking on the role of the warm but ruthless Blue, an operative of the more organically inclined potential distant future of the Garden. Each of these two agents embeds herself in various timelines across time and space in an effort to ensure that her future comes to pass. After eons at odds, Blue follows an impulse and leaves Red a teasing letter, inciting a barbed cor­respondence that evolves over years into flirtation and love, and kicking off an asynchronous series of events that ouroboruses into an inevitable yet thrilling conclusion. Yes, okay, “ouroboros” is not a verb, and maybe using it as one gives too much away; but if you can’t see what’s going to/will have happened fairly early on, then you’re really not paying attention. The point of this story is in the journey, which is poetic and lovely with a nicely dark tinge, and voiced in a way that feels true to the text.

– Amy Goldschlager

This review and more like it in the October 2019 issue of Locus .

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This Is How You Lose the Time War Hardcover – July 16, 2019

• Print length 208 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Gallery / Saga Press
• Publication date July 16, 2019
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1534431004
• ISBN-13 978-1534431003
• See all details

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What's it about, amazon editors say....

This slim, emotionally riveting tale of love and loyalty packs a wallop more potent than that of books three times its size.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gallery / Saga Press; First Edition (July 16, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1534431004
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1534431003
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
• #1,481 in Time Travel Fiction
• #3,178 in Science Fiction Romance (Books)
• #5,909 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)

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About the authors

Amal el-mohtar.

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic: her short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, while her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She is the author of THE HONEY MONTH, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and writes the OTHERWORLDLY column for the New York Times Book Review. She's the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, an epistolary time-travelling spy vs spy novella. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

Max Gladstone

MAX GLADSTONE is a fencer, a fiddler, and Hugo Award Finalist. He has taught English in China, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Max lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston. He is the author of the Craft Sequence (Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, Last First Snow, Four Roads Cross, and Ruin of Angels).

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