This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone

Paperback, 224 pages

Published March 17, 2020 by Gallery / Saga Press.

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

(6 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

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

Love letters meets time travel

3 stars

Worth reading but I wasn’t up on all the literary references as much as you need to be. The quality of the writing was obvious and superb, but, oddly for a novella, I felt it a little too long. I wanted the story to move on from the love letter correspondence between Red and Blue one or two letters earlier. The immersion that was achieved for the diverse locations with such brief descriptions was my highlight. There’s a mystery character appearing at the end of each letter, and although readers (esp. any fantasy/SF reader) would spot who that is, when we actually meet them, for the end game, I got more into the romance of it.

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

Beautiful words

5 stars

Beautiful poetry of language. A familiar enough story in a completely refreshing way. Strikingly reminiscent of Sofia Samatar's short stories in its focus of characters' hearts into epistolary confessions, and how the science fiction is not meant to be fully understood. Unlike Samatar, there was maybe less groundedness, lived-in feeling of the world, and connections of the characters. However, Red and Blue's personalities and changing relationship with each other shone through as powerful. There's also a nice rhythm to the book, over all the weirdness: a structure that makes it all flow and unconfusing. The highlight of this was how precise and perfect the poetic language of the book was.

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

a teapot in a tempest

5 stars

"This is How You Lose the Time War" asks the reader to perch on the shoulders of two operatives on opposing sides of a time-traveling war.

Each chapter follows "Red" or "Blue" as they scurry up and down timelines and across dimensions. The book is both sweepingly broad and extremely contained and personal.

The settings flit by, dizzying: a temple for mechanized humans, an ancient holy cave, the assassination of Caesar - each sketched with broad, emotional strokes to give the setting an aesthetic. One gets the sense that a great web of cause and effect is being constantly constructed, altered, and destroyed, without ever seeing the full picture.

"This is How You Lose the Time War" asks the reader to perch on the shoulders of two operatives on opposing sides of a time-traveling war.

Each chapter follows "Red" or "Blue" as they scurry up and down timelines and across dimensions. The book is both sweepingly broad and extremely contained and personal.

Against these backdrops, the characters "Red" and "Blue" write to each other - as nemeses, then as friends, ever deeper entangled even as they demolish each other's plans and forces. The letters make up an enormous part of the experience, and they are comic, intimate... poignant. I didn't give a damn about the war - I just wanted these two characters to be alright.

I loved it. I stayed up past midnight every day I was reading, which wasn't long because I had to see what came next and kept reading.

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

A meeting of minds

4 stars

How do you have a love story between two beings separated by war, time and dimensions? With covert letters. They may be written in seeds or lava flows, but letters nevertheless.

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.