“This is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an award-winning speculative fiction novella about two time travelers on the opposite sides of a time war who fall in love.
Red and Blue are the most formidable agents of two opposing futures, each side fighting to shape events to ensure their future comes to pass. In the midst of this epic space-time war, they cross paths and begin to exchange “letters” (in quotation marks, because apart from content, they’re far from our traditional concept of “letters”).
This 200-page novella is the most high concept love story I’ve ever read. The world (or, actually, worlds, plural) of this story are so far removed from our own that when I recognize a pop culture or historical reference, it feels as though I’m looking at our world through the eyes of an alien.
There’s no hand-holding either. The book is so short, that we’re just dropped in right from the start, and every instance of world-building we get from then on is only when relevant to the plot or character development. The writing is neat and precise, in that way. I love detailed and rambling world-building, but I also enjoy the immersiveness of a story that just drops you into the shoes of its characters.
This is what may also stop some from reading this book. The alien setting and out-there concept can be intimidating. It took me a long time to start this book too, but it took me less than a day to finish it. If it helps, I’d call this soft scifi, a subgenre of scifi with less emphasis on the science (such as less detailed world-building) and more on story. This book is character-driven, with the plot picking up only at the end. In about 200 pages, maybe half are Blue and Red’s letters to each other, and the rest are introspective explorations of their motivations.
I once received the same advice from two different professors at two different times: if you’re having a hard time with the writing, don’t worry about understanding everything at first, just keep reading and eventually you’ll get used to the cadence. This is one of the most practical pieces of advice I’ve ever received in my life. My lit prof was talking about “A Clockwork Orange” and my philosophy prof meant, well, every single reading she assigned, but it’s opened me up to so many other books and articles, even things like weird and obscure movies. It certainly applies to “This is How You Lose the Time War”. It took me about three chapters to get the writing style. Then, I flipped back and started the book again with new eyes, something I would repeat immediately after finishing the novella.
The scale of this book’s setting may be epic, and truly puts the “speculative” in speculative fiction, but it’s at its core a love story. It’s a heartbreakingly, life-affirmingly romantic story that explores the nature of war and the internal lives of people unmoored from time and space, and the conclusion is that love can change the world (or, worlds, plural). As cheesy as it sounds (and El-Mohtar and Gladstone do not make it sound cheesy at all), it’s love that makes Red and Blue question their superiors, their war, and their lives’ purpose.
This novella doesn’t shy from the bloodiness and mundanity of violence in war. Red and Blue, despite being their sides’ most effective weapons, couldn’t be further from the decision-making that goes into their missions. They are tools, and if ordered, they would kill a boatload of people if it meant one of the passenger’s niece’s son’s poems is or isn’t published, whichever outcome best serves their future. And yet, each side’s respective decision-maker is totally divorced from humanity. They still get to decide who lives or dies. There is no glorification of war here. Instead, Red and Blue fight to carve a space for love in the midst of such violence, and isn’t that universal?
“This is How You Lose the Time War” is also an exploration of language and communication. Red and Blue’s exchanges are described in terms of “infiltration” and “infection” and in a way, communicating with other people really is like being infiltrated or infected with new and foreign ideas and perspectives. Falling in love, too, is like infiltration and infection.
This novella was beautifully written, lovingly crafted, and it broke and remade my heart whilst stretching and challenging my ideas of space and time. The pining was insane. 5/5 stars bigolas dickolas wolfwood was right.
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