HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA “[An] exquisitely crafted tale…Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay…This short novel warrants multiple readings … short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review).
From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment 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, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?
Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.
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An intimate and lyrical tour of time, myth and history, with a captivating conversation between characters—and authors. Read it.
Time travel f/f/ enemies (literally trying to kill each other)-to-lovers epistolary cyborg SFF love story. Need I say more? If, yes: an original enthralling story that will leave you tearing through it to find out how it ends.
This book has it all: treachery and love, lyricism and gritty action, existential crisis and space-opera scope, not to mention time traveling superagents. Gladstone’s and El-Mohtar’s debut collaboration is a fireworks display from two very talented storytellers.
This book is truly bananas, and I think in a good way? I’m still processing. Anyway, things I liked: the format (when it’s done well, I am so here for the epistolary novel), the pacing, the world (Did I understand it? No, not really, but I sort of loved how chaotic it all was by the end). The romance was also 11/10, but it does pick up quickly (imo) and I would have liked an even slower burn, given that Red and Blue start out as enemy agents. At times the language felt a little too clever, a little too “see what I did there” — sort of like when two people try to let you in on an inside joke but don’t really explain it all that well. I’d have liked to be let in on the bit sooner (the “bit” being the whole time travel logic, mostly). Anyway, if Studio Ghibli could adapt this bonkers, beautiful, breathtaking book into a movie then my little heart would probably burst from glee.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is rich and strange, a romantic tour through all of time and the multiverse, and you shouldn’t miss a moment.
This was an amazing read and has been placed into my reread pile. The prose is glorious, the conversations full of wit and mischief. Months later, I’m still smiling over it.
Pure poetry. It’s not a novella, it’s a love letter.
This is a hard one to write.
Not because I didn’t like it, which I did, but because it’s hard to put everything I’m thinking into words.
There is a war being fought across time.
Red is under orders of the Agency, a technologically driven faction, while Blue serves the Garden, a Nature-bent fighting power.
These two agents find themselves thwarting each other’s plans and changing the world to get closer to their side’s desired outcome. And all is good until a letter is found and read.
And so Red and Blue start exchanging letters, taunting and pushing each other.
Soon that exchange starts taking a turn as more personal details are being revealed and the “friendly enemy” relation turns into a more romantic one.
But throughout this exchange there’s also the pervasive fear of being found by their superiors and being deemed traitors, a fear that grows as a strange shadow starts following and stealing the destroyed remains of the letters.
This might seem like a simple plot but it’s a lot more complex. I’m just trying to avoid spoilers.
Concerning the book structure, I have to be honest: books in letter format are not usually something I look forward to- However, in this particular case it’s an amazing way to tell the story and to keep things moving along.
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone do an amazing job telling a story of how feelings evolve and how sometimes the more people might seem different from us, the closer and the more likely they are to understanding who we really are.
Thus book was a one of most different reads I have ever gotten my hands on! It was written unlike anything I’ve ever read. However, because of this, it was a little hard to understand. I did like how it was written, and the characters.
I’m a fantasy reader at heart, but enjoy a dabble into sci-fi now-and-then, so after seeing so much praise heaped onto the Hugo and Nebula and Locus Award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War I decided to give it a shot.
The first chapter immediately sets the tone for the rest of the novella: it’s lyrical, expertly written, imaginative … and incredibly confusing. This is a book all about tone, about ambience, an exquisitely narrated tale of how two opposing characters intertwine through time and reality. It’s about how they share their thoughts through letters hidden across a thousand timelines on a thousand worlds, and how they come to terms with the development of their relationship.
This is How You Lose the Time War is less a novella and more a poem; an overwhelming series of metaphors and dreamlike reflections where each word of each phrase has been lovingly crafted to make a consistent whole.
Lots of people love these types of books. I am not one of them. I need to identify with the characters of the story. I need the plot to be engaging enough to entice me to keep turning the pages. I need to be able to clearly visualise what’s happening, and how the story uses the time it has to inform me on the people and places of the world it is set in.
If there’s no discernible agency; or nothing to make me care about the characters, then the tale itself, unfortunately, loses its charm.
I think this is one of those books that’s all about the journey, not the destination, which isn’t really what I’m looking for.
I have never so enjoyed reading a book that required me to flip back and reread a previous page or chapter. This book sings, and it’s complex and startling and just amazing and I ripped through it and then suffered a book hangover for days.
“Burn before reading.”
And with that we embark, along with Blue and Red, on a beautifully written journey of awakening.
The journey is, in part, conveyed to the reader in letters. And it is through this epistolary narrative that we are able to seamlessly shift points of view and watch the relationship between Blue and Red grow as they each begin to depend and ultimately trust each other. They form a bond (based on mutual trust and openness) that neither of them have ever truly experienced before and both are better for it.
The title makes reference to a time war and indeed the story focuses on two protagonists fighting this war. But the war is a secondary consideration. It is the relationship between our protagonists which is the heart of this story. And truly it is a love story.
So if you are looking for a time travel story that focuses on the time travel, how it works, paradoxes, etc. this may not be the book for you. But if you are looking for a character driven journey of exploration that involves time travel, then I strongly recommend it!
As I started reading this it didn’t feel quite like my cup of tea, but it was too fascinating to put down, even when it sometimes felt a bit like work to read. Then at about 60% everything came crashing together and I was suddenly completely entranced and enamored to the story of Red & Blue. In the end is it one of those poignant stories that leaves you with much to think about. This is one of those books that requires so much focus and thought on details that I suspect it will be even more enjoyable on a reread.
Letters are many things in Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War. Taunts between foes. Invitations to friendship. Missives of love.
They are also, at various points, tree rings, magma, and bubbles. (Seal guts are involved at one point too.)
This epistolary novella begins as a contest between two time travelers, the preeminent members of competing organizations bent on shaping the multiverse to fit their respective visions. Red works for the Agency, a technologically advanced version of humanity that’s implanted her with weapons and armor and pseudo-skin that can change form as required. Blue works for Garden, an organic hivemind whose members have evolved natural corollaries to these tools of destruction and deception. When deployed against each other, Red and Blue are “equal and opposite reaction[s],” as Blue terms them at one point, “a microcosm … of the war as a whole.”
Their struggle is the next thing to endless. Both are essentially immortal, capable of playing the longest of long games in one “strand” (i.e., potential timeline) after another. They might live out an entire life advising a variation of Genghis Khan, for example, and then skip to a resulting future to alter the outcome of a space battle, before circling back to a connecting past to ensure that the wind in an underground labyrinth “whistles over the right fluted bones,” so that “one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with child in a storm, and so it goes.” Sometimes these actions seem noble, like immunizing Native Americans centuries before contact with Europeans. But in other missions Red and Blue massacre millions.
And it wears. Early in the time war, it was probably easy for these adversaries to shrug off the psychic toll levied by their work—why bother with morality when there are multitudes, when London has so many incarnations they’re labeled with numbers and letters? Yet after eons of plotting and maneuvering and killing, the war goes on, and Red and Blue have little to show for their service.
Except their rivalry.
One-upping each other becomes a new challenge. Not just in the field—although they do plenty of showing off there too (subtle and otherwise). But after Blue rubs in a victory by sending Red a letter that can only be read by burning it, Red responds with a message that can only be read by boiling. From there, they concoct increasingly elaborate ways to continue their correspondence. In the process, their relationship changes, morphing from competition to curiosity to … something more.
It’s a fascinating tale.
The prose borders on poetry—mostly to the good, although I occasionally had trouble following the action. And I’m not sure all the time travel mechanics add up. (If Red and Blue can pinpoint their communications to the exact time and place the other will receive them, how have their parent organizations not figured out when and where to assassinate each other’s agents?) But I loved the ways El-Mohtar and Gladstone play with the concept of letters. “There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?” muses Red at one point—words you can reread to take you back to a specific moment, no matter how long it’s been since you first read them.
The paper can vary. Same with the ink. But the transportive quality of letters endures. I only wish we wrote more of them in our current “strand.”
(For more reviews like this one, see http://www.nickwisseman.com)
This read like a complex dream. I had a hard time visualizing some descriptors, but I couldn’t put the book down. What an unexpected, amazing love story!
Easily the best book I’ve read in years. Surprising, poignant and clever, stuffed with deft observations and twists on history. Like reading a conversation about all the deep things between two lovers, while simultaneously waging war in the multiverse. An immaculate triumph.
Is this the best book I’ve ever read?? I mean, I think it is. I read it practically in one sitting – from the set-up (two women fall in love through letters while on different sides of an epic battle), to the perfectly poetic prose, to the romance, the yearning, the imagery. This sci-fi novella absolutely blew my socks off and I immediately bought my own copy so I can re-read it again.
I adored this book! It’s about two women, Red and Blue, who are enemies but fall in love through letters. The writing style very different from what I’m used to, its more like poetry. It might take a while to get into it at first but once you fall in love with the writing, it’ll be a breeze.
Their letters to each other are the highlight of the book. It’s incredibly romantic and very creative. It’s gorgeous and sapphic and I would highly recommend it if you love enemies to lovers and time travel!
I want to meet you in every place I have loved.
Book 1 : Julie 0
It’s always a delight when a book has an intriguing premise and is beautifully written. This Is How You Lose The Time War manages to be an innovative and exciting work of science fiction while transcending its genre to meditate on the meaning of time, progress and history. This is largely an epistolary novel, containing an exchange of letters between Red and Blue, time travelling agents who are employed by rival organisations locked in perpetual war over the fate of the timeline. While their letters begin as taunts from across a bloody battlefield, they gradually develop a friendship and, eventually, a forbidden romance. But they are still locked into war that only one side can win and if their relationship is discovered it will mean certain death. If that premise isn’t enough to get you interested, perhaps the interesting way in which it is written will. The book is jointly written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, with El-Mohtar writing all of Blue’s letters and Gladstone writing all of Red’s. Because you really are reading an exchange between two distinct writers, known for writing poetry and fiction respectively, the reader feels a palpable shift in each of the two characters writing styles. Both authors also happen to have an absolutely beautiful, lyrical style of writing that feels slightly otherworldly but is also peppered with distinctly nerdy jokes. In short, I was in heaven. This book also happens to be very short (only 200 pages) so I can’t recommend losing a day or so getting absorbed in it enough.