“Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning—poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do.”

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

Summary

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.

My Thoughts

When I first started This Is How You Lose The Time War it was 2024, but I got busy, my library time expired, and I didn’t end up coming back to it and finishing it until 2025. Having said that, it was completely worth it. Part of the reason that I had not finished it was because I was only 20% of the way through and the book is rather slow to pick up, but by the halfway mark I was thoroughly entranced. The story alternates between the perspectives of our two main characters: Blue and Red. It goes from a scene that Blue is in, to a letter they have found from Red, to then a scene Red is in and a letter they find from Blue. So this modern, sapphic sci-fi epistolary goes. It’s a gorgeous love story told by two people who fall in love only through their words, and the two authors recognize this. 

Many of the lines speak to the power of the written language to create emotions, love, and so much more. Each of the author writes a different character, giving them two unique voices. The prose is powerful, ethereal, at times purple and full of sentiments of love. The actual action occurring is intentionally vague, referencing recognizable parts of history—the Mongol Conquest, the Stabbing of Caesar, the sinking of Atlantis—but never with too much time wasted on unnecessary exposition. It is about how our characters find the letters and fall in love, first and foremost, but the authors are sure to immerse you in the world first. Any attempt at further concreteness would be useless to the narrative, quite frankly. Red and Blue flit through time and as a reader, I was immersed in the multiverse from the start, especially as the tension began picking up. A testament to the authors, each letter feels unique, like a hiding place from the rest of the story in the same way the letters are hidden and special to Red and Blue within the novel; the structure allows readers to better empathize with our protagonists. ‘Letters are structures, not events,’ Red writes to Blue, ‘Yours give me a place to live inside.’  

The sci-fi world building stands strong. On Red’s side, the Commandment, a technocratic world. On Blue’s side, the Garden, where everything is organic and grown and one. Yet both sides have the same ruthlessness and cruelty that comes from years of war, a distance from their soldiers on the ground who follow orders without knowing why. Red and Blue’s letters are not always in a language we would recognize. They are transmitted through feathers, through spiders, through seeds, and this speaks to how we fall in love with the essence of a person. However, the complicated, sometimes dense prose can make the novel slow at times, and I had to often take a pause to truly understand what was happening or being said. Metaphors and analogies are plentiful, occasionally too much. That does not take away from the strength of this Romeo and Juliet love story however, and I would absolutely recommend reading it.

Review: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2

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