#max gladstone

This is How You Lose The Time War

“I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you”

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.

This book has found it’s place in my top ten books of 2021. What can I say about this book, which makes for a good review, rather than just a long gush fest? Let’s try, shall we?

Well first of all, it’s sci-fi, but that’s not what the book is really about. It’s a love story, but also more than that. Not your typical enemies to lovers story, it’s a tale of how two agents have formed a bond with each other, which spans across time and space. It is a relatively short book, only 198 pages long, but it definitely manages to do the story justice. I found it to be fulfilling, and enjoyable. The writing was poetic, without being pretentious.

While I enjoyed the sci-fi element of the story, I did struggle a bit to fully get my head around the world building. But Blue and Red’s love story was such a strong anchor, that I would still give this book 5 stars ⭐️

This Is How You Lose The Time War should have been everything - it’s a sapphic enemies to lovers epistolary novella - and yet I was a tiny bit disappointed.

it does a lot of things really well—in particular I love Red and Blue and the interplay between them.  Red, impulsive and emotional and talkative and playful; Blue, the precise, controlled sensualist; both of them lonely for all the cloud/hive intimacy of their societies, and finding connection and completion in each other.

I also really love how this book conceptualises a war in time - that history forks constantly with our lives and choices, roads taken and not, so each side is trying to braid those strands to make the future where they exist inevitable - and the eras and places, alternate and familiar, that we visit as a result.

in fact, the book’s real power is how it makes Red and Blue’s lives as time-travelling spies, and falling in love, metaphors for each other: the letters hidden all around, just as everything speaks of the beloved to a lover; the idea of ‘infiltrating’ each other’s hearts and thoughts; the way that love spreads back through time, so that who you were before that person feels like another life entirely, almost impossible to imagine.

the love letters themselves are Gladstone and El-Mohtar at their most poetic, delighting in the sound and feel of language for its own sake; as grand and savage and strange as beings with all of time and space at their command would be. (also, 95% of the lines which are sending the Tumblr tag absolutely feral come from Max Gladstone and I am yelling.  “how do you write like that”, they ask.  I know!  this is what I’ve been saying!  please read his other books. and also subscribe to his Substack, because he’s smart and thoughtful and funny as well as a good writer.)

the trouble I had with the book, however, was firstly that I found it much harder to grasp how Garden worked than I did the Agency; but more importantly, that Red and Blue fell in love much too quickly.  

the appeal of enemies to lovers is that wary alliance, that slow building of trust; the recalibration of your understanding of the world as you come to care about and value someone from the ‘other side’.  and if there is any writer out there who’s deeply concerned about and interested in that sort of radical, courageous emotional generosity, it’s Max Gladstone!  not to mention that Amal too greatly values open-hearted connection and conversation!  but somehow it just wasn’t there.  apart from some initial curiosity about how the other side worked, and the occasional suspicion that it was a honeytrap, the characters went ahead and dived right in.  

it’s as if the two authors wanted to write about being in love, not falling in love. (and yet I find the middle section, where Red and Blue have declared themselves to each other but before we start playing with time, the slowest; in particular, the recommendation of Travel Light feels like El-Mohtar talking to Gladstone, not the characters.)

nonetheless, it has a lot to offer, and I’m very glad it won a Hugo; because they deserve all the awards always, and because of the loveliness of both of their responses.  Amal was astonished and pleased, but Max genuinely humbled to think that he was now officially a part of the history of his chosen genre, and his name inscribed in its annals.

lunamonchtuna:

—Amal El-Mohtar, fromThis Is How You Lose the Time War (vialunamonchtuna)