Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone have ushered in a groundbreaking addition to the speculative fiction meta-narrative, and they’ve done it with absolute pizzazz. This is How You Lose the Time War is an ode to everything wacky, weird, and wondrous, and has cemented its place in my recommendations for anyone wanting to peek their head out of contemporary works and into the unknown.
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant 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, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.
This book is off the walls weird in the best way possible. The prose was poetic and the world-building was sublime. Just when I thought I understood what was happening to our lovely MCs, Red and Blue, I was blindsided by, well, by everything. Co-author Max Gladstone has talked a lot about de-familiarization, the theory of making what you think you know into a foreign concept, and it’s apparent within the first few pages that This is How You Lose the Time War is going for the same thing. Red and Blue read and write each other letters in the most extraordinary of ways: in trees, in seeds, in fish digested by a walrus and fires raging across Atlantis and tea leaves in the dredges of a cup from another dimension. Just trying to wrap my head around the different timestreams—time is a braid of threads, who knew?—and realities seemed nearly impossible, but that was the fun in it all. The creativity needed for a project like this is infinite—El-Mohtar and Gladstone are master literary technicians.
The worldbuilding and concepts weren’t the only places where this book shined, though. The budding love story between Red, a hardass from a robotic future, and Blue, a witty girl from a plant-based dimension, was engaging and beautiful. Unsexualized sapphic representation in adult literary works, specifically in adult literary speculative fiction, is rare, but we get it here, and it's honestly beautiful. Not once are Red or Blue sexualized or objectified as women-aligning characters, and their relationship is created for them and their own happiness, not for the reader's fetishization. Not to mention seeing them fall in love through their letters had me on the edge of my seat. You get to see the real sides of the agents, behind their carefully constructed exteriors. I’m normally not a fan of epistolary works and was half-expecting to hate the book because of it, but Red and Blue’s correspondence makes this story what it is. I do wish I got to see more in-person interactions between Red and Blue—the yearning can get a little much at times—but it didn’t take away from the reading of their story or their relationship. The book is extremely innovative all the same, and the execution is near perfect.
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month (2010). Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Books and on Tor.com. She became the Otherworldly columnist at the New York Times in February 2018, and is represented by DongWon Song of HMLA.
Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus Award winning author Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This is How You Lose the Time War. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect.
More about El-Mohtar and Gladstone can be found on their websites, https://amalelmohtar.com/ and https://www.maxgladstone.com/ respectively. Gladstone’s latest book, Last Exit, is available for purchase now.
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