This Is How You Lose the Time War
Ratings1,133
Average rating3.9
absolutely fantastic read....definitely recommend if your looking for a one sitting read
A beautifully written book with subtle complexities, glorious prose with clever time-travel and a warming story of falling in love. If enemies-to-lovers is a trope you like, this pulls it off in a totally uncliched way with a deep Sapphic love borne on letters across time and space.
I can see how this might polarise some opinions and I held off reading it for so long because I was worried I might fall into the dislike camp - not so! I've heard this book accused of being too complicated and boring people but I couldn't disagree more. It is perfectly balanced and brilliantly executed; I found myself hungry to read the next chapter every time I got to the end of the previous. Clever, then, that ‘hunger' is a theme Blue and Red explore in their missives to each other.
o forbidden love, i eat u like berry, i love u the most, when we pee i want our yellows to meld.
Nice change of pace, a baroque epistolary correspondence through love letters of opposing agents of an interdimensional timewar is novel enough.
I'm not eloquent enough to put words to the feelings this book made me feel as I read it. What I can say though, is that in some small way my life has been enriched now that I've read it, and I wish that I'd gotten round to reading sooner.
Perfection
This book has ruined me for all others. It will forever live under my skin, like a reed attempting to break free. Reader beware.
4.5
It would be 5 stars but I had a hard time getting into it. It gets even better as it goes.
“This is how we win.”
Nog één van die boeken die op mijn Kindle stonden en dat ik geen idee meer had waarom ik het er wanneer op had gezet.
Ik begon te lezen, en ik was op een paar korte hoofdstukken verkocht. Dit is, in essentie, een briefroman. Red komt van The Agency, een samenleving in de verre toekomst die hypertechnologisch is, Blue van the Garden, een soort biologisch groepsbewustzijn, ook in de verre toekomst.
Ze staan allebei voor een stuk buiten hun eigen maatschappij, want ze zijn agenten in een oorlog die zich in verschillende tijden in verschillende alternatieve realiteiten afspeelt. Hoe dat allemaal technologisch gebeurt, is minder van belang. Wat ze doen, is tussenkomen in allerlei gebeurtenissen, wellicht om er voor te proberen zorgen dat in die verre toekomst de enige “echte” realiteit hetzij die technologische, hetzij die biologische is.
Terwijl ze hun werk doen — een vulkaan op één van de vele Atlantissen in het multiversum doen uitbarsten, de juiste persoon vermoorden, een tempel vernietigen, iemand een leven lang gezelschap houden zodat zijn kleinzoon een bepaald soort karakter heeft waardoor die op een bepaald moment de juiste persoon op de juiste manier begeleidt — weten ze van elkaars bestaan af. Ze zijn elk aan hun kant de beste van in wat ze doen.
En op een dag beslist één van de twee een brief te schrijven naar de andere. “Brief” is meestal zeer onletterlijk te nemen trouwens: soms is de brief geschreven in de as van een brief, soms in een braakbal van een uil, soms geschreven in de groeiringen van een boom over een periode van honderd jaar.
Eerst om wat te plagen (ze omschrijven elkaars wereld als “techy-mechy dystopia” en “viney-hivey elfworld”), maar brief na brief groeit er Iets Schoons. Want ze hebben eigenlijk meer met elkaar gemeen dan met de maatschappijen waar ze vandaan komen.
En het is spannend, en er is verraad en liefde en een onvermijdelijk maar daarom niet minder schoon einde. En het is uitstekend geschreven, met elke auteur die één van de personages voor zich nam en dat de brieven ook telkens weer verrassingen voor elkaar waren, waardoor het ook nog eens een fijn verbaal en literair steekspel wordt.
Zeer, zéér hard aangeraden. Kreeg ook de Nebula in 2019 en de Hugo en 2020, dus 't is niet alleen ik die het goed vind.
This is a love story with a sci-fi twist.
In this world, two opposing forces, Garden and Agency, move forward and backward in time (upthread and downthread) to affect events to ensure the survivability of their peoples. Red (Agency) and Blue (Garden) are rivals who at first taunt and compete with each other, then - through secret letters and notes they leave one another - fall in love. They never meet - both wear different faces and take on different identities at each mission - at least not in flesh, but get to know each other intimately through words. We follow their clandestine relationship, as they attempt desperately to evade the detection of their oppressive leaders, and of the mysterious Seeker.
The writing is lush and poetic, even as it narrates death and violence (which, as human history will attest - and both of them do traverse history, mentioning along the way Khan and Caesar, among others - is full of blood and cruelty), destruction and desolation. It gives us a tantalising glimpse of what can be done and undone should we have the power to travel through time.
But this novella by American writer Max Gladstone and Canadian author and poet Amal el-Mohtar is not about human history. It is about love's power and how it spans space and time, and overcomes all odds to survive.
#booknotes #reads2020 #scifireads #thisishowyoulosethetimewar
It was really quite beautiful. I am less a fan of the story telling convention where we get it through a series of letters, memos, media, etc; I prefer direct story telling. If it'd been a different format, I likely would have given it 4 stars. Despite this, it's a beautiful story.
I enjoyed the premise and universe implied in this sapphic story. The Garden reminds me of Hank Green's second book A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor where its explained that there is an organic computer that spans the worlds lifeforms, the Garden's space at the end reminded me of fluidic space from species 8472 from star trek voyager. The agency reminded me of the Diaspora by Greg Egan, where some humans put their consciousnesses into floating computer ships to travel the universe.
The whole plot concept reminded me of The Coincidence Makers by Yoav Blum where people subtly influence time and events.
All that to say, it 100% helps to have the framework to think about things before reading this book. Its very flowery and poem-esque. Details are light and far between. A lot of reviews talk about being confused about whats going on but enjoying the letter they write eachother. I think it helps to have experience in the concepts behind the letters in this book.
I would say 3.5 stars if good reads let me.
Two rival agents slipping through time, snipping errant histories, nudging specific events forward that will blossom in significance, eradicating entire civilizations to better braid a multi-threaded universe, all in the hopes of cultivating a more ideal future.
They are the best of their respective worlds. Red exists for the Agency, a post-singularity, technocratic world while Blue fights for the Garden, a verdant utopia. As their actions intersect through time, pushing and pulling against each other to better order the universe to their side, they begin to admit a begrudging warrior's respect for the other's skill.
A respect that soon blossoms into something more. Co-written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone who would write to each other much like Red and Blue. One would fashion the letter the other creating the circumstances that the letter would be read. Elaborate intricacies, words hidden in knots, bee stings, the rings of trees and carved on an undigested piece of cod amidst the viscera of a clubbed seal.
It is a testament to their writing that I was more interested in how this love progressed than the intricacies of a time war. And an achievement that a time tossed love story could end in a way that felt earned and satisfactory.
It has been years since I read a science fiction novella (or novel) that was as good in as many ways as This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
This is an immersive book–we are taken directly into a complex and unknown world with little expository explanation. I didn't know who Red and Blue were, nor why they were fighting a war in time. The descriptions of action were fuzzy at best. I almost gave up, and would have if the book was longer.
Then, subtly, slowly, I was drawn in to this curious epistolary relationship between Red and Blue, two major players on opposite sides of a generations long, galaxy spanning war in time.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is all about love and erudition and language and poetry and the obsession that drives two people in love under impossible circumstances. El-Mohtar and Gladstone make the book complex and poetic, literary and romantic. Their collaboration is perfect, their words matched to the tone and setting. Red and Blue riff off each other with perfectly constructed styles using metaphors and imagery with cultural and literary references. This epistolary novel is as complex in structure as the time strands that Red and Blue traverse and manipulate in their generations long war over interstellar distances.
Although the time war has little detail or explanation, it provides the connection between lovers, a challenge for them to overcome, and crucially, the structure for their redemption.
We feel deeply for Red and Blue and we feel their precarious situations amid the uncertainty they live in where time and worlds are mutable. They question their own motives and actions, and those of others, while regaling each other with romantic letters transmitted through subtle and abstruse steganography.
In alternating narrative strands and in the letters of Red and Blue, El-Mohtar and Gladstone build a world, they build lives, they build romance and they create magic.
Read it.
“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.”
Wow. Wow. This is so beautifully written. So expertly crafted. It just became my new all time favorite. Just wow.
Where to even start...this is such a different type of book for me. It took me a bit before I caught the flow and really got into it. It's hard because you are dropped into the middle of a war, without any back story, without knowing who Red & Blue are, likewise not knowing what roles the Garden and the Agency play in this war.
What you come to find is that somehow, during this time travel war, Red & Blue have fallen in love. They go against their respective leaders and send letters to each other, while the love deepens and blooms. How or why they fall in love is up to the reader to interpret.
The language is flowery and beautiful, as to be expected with any love story. After reading this I wonder if a reread someday may reveal more. Although this is short, it definitely does not lack in content or in depth.
For me, there is too much emphasis on the form and not enough on the content.
The structure of this book is too rigid, making some parts not interesting enough.
Although, I like some parts, especially the letters that are about simple things in life.
The authors have a solid command of the English language and show it throughout the entire book.
This type of heavily abstract and poetry like writing made it difficult for me to get into at first; I may have spent 10 minutes on a single page at some point. By the end I felt like my mind was was being weaved through time, place, space and emotion.
Letters between two time-traveling agents on opposite sides of a war. It started out really slow and I didn't really see the point of it but everything came together towards the end. I preferred the parts of the book that weren't letters and were proper descriptions of what was happening.
Giving this a sort-of 4, I wouldn't necessarily recommend buying this one though.
A series of letters charting a developing relationship between two beings across time and space, This Is How You Lose The Time War is modern day Romeo and Juliet story of two lovers on the opposite sides of a conflict. The conflict in question here is a time war, between ‘The Agency' and ‘The Garden'. Red and Blue, the two agents in question work for the opposing sides and come to recognize each others work and develop a correspondence.
Whilst nominally a scifi story, this book is much more about the relationship between Red and Blue than anything else. The way the story is told through a series of letters gives it some interesting literary stylings that are quite different to any other scifi story I have read. There is some vivid imagery in the descriptions of how the letters are sent - through all sorts of unusual mediums such as taste, patterns in lava flows etc. The creativity in retelling what is essentially an old story (star-crossed lovers) is impressive.
That said, these literary stylings do add some detachment from the story. The grandiose prose and stylistic flourishes, whilst pretty, are somewhat distracting. It is a shorter novel, so it doesn't outstay its welcome, but its stylistic impulses do make it a somewhat heavy read for its genre.
It took me a little bit to get into, to get familiar with the rhythms of it, but once I did, oh my god. It was beautiful, touching, and searing.
Very poetic and beautifully written. I particularly liked the Red character. Due to its style, it lacks momentum, but I don't hold that against it. I actually found it somewhat meditative.