This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

No cover — Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War (Paperback, 2020, Gallery / Saga Press)

Paperback, 224 pages

Published March 17, 2020 by Gallery / Saga Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-5344-3099-0

(22 reviews)

Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.”

So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space.

Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they’re the best, and they’re alone.

Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it?

A tour de force collaboration from …

In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.”

So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space.

Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it?

A tour de force collaboration from two powerhouse writers that spans the whole of time and space.

5 editions

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar

Weird and beautiful but not always up to its own ambition

4 stars

The letters that make up about half of this book are gorgeously written, and I love the story they tell. The basic idea of the time war is clever, and the descriptions of placetimes the characters find themselves in evocative, sometimes reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities. I devoured this book in a few days.

And yet... something about it felt a little thin or hollow behind its fireworks. I think it was a good artistic choice to leave all technical details out, but I couldn't help but get hung up on the time paradoxes. Not that it's the authors' responsibility to necessarily avoid or solve them, but for me personally they intruded on the suspension of disbelief.

Merovius reviewed This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar

Review of 'This Is How You Lose the Time War' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Hauntingly beautiful. A love-letter to the written word.

bookafnd reviewed This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar

probably not for everyone, but it's very good

5 stars

it's a magical realist (?) romance in a science fiction Time War setting, an unusual choice, but one that works well, given how strange the consequences of warping causality would be. If you can get ahold of the audio book, it's pretty good, has different readers for Blue and Red.