This is How You Lose the Time War
2019
- science fiction
- time-traveling
- epistolary
- lgbt
- english literature
- fiction, science fiction, general
- nyt:trade-fiction-paperback=2023-05-28
- time travel
- fiction
The story
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.” So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space. Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they’re the best, and they’re alone. Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it? A tour de force collaboration from two powerhouse writers that spans the whole of time and space.
What it’s like
Epistolary and lush: the book unfolds as letters, marginalia and fragments passed between two rivals, so the reading texture is intimate and handwritten, full of lyrical, exacting sentences that sparkle with imagery of gardens, ash, clockwork and stars. The voices are sharply differentiated, one brisk and technocratic, the other florid and tender, and the pages feel like paper that has been folded, annotated and carried. Vibe: bittersweet, romantic, a little wistful, with a current of urgency underneath. It suits a slow rainy afternoon, a late night read in bed, or a reread when you want something that feels like an intimate secret passed hand to hand. Pacing is quick in short letter-length bursts, yet each one lingers. The emotional arc is a wary, initially antagonistic pair slowly becoming confidants and then lovers, their trust built through words alone. Violence exists as the backdrop of an ongoing war, described in clear but not graphic terms, with occasional sharp moments of danger and loss; sexual content is minimal and not explicit. It is for readers who love queer romance, time-travel puzzles, and sentences they want to underline.
More books like This is How You Lose the Time War
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved This is How You Lose the Time Warand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
