“This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a dazzling tour de force of speculative fiction. This novella, rich with poetic prose and profound emotion, tells a mesmerizing tale of rival time-traveling agents, Red and Blue, who find love amidst their temporal battles. El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s writing is a symphony of beauty and tension, weaving a narrative that is both heart-wrenching and exhilarating. Their innovative storytelling and vivid imagery create an unforgettable experience. This book is a masterpiece, a must-read for anyone who cherishes imaginative and deeply moving stories.

*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. However, I did purchase a paperback copy with my own money.

This is a book that I’ve heard such mixed things about but I completely fell in love with it. Each chapter is just a few pages long but the authors manage to pack in so much detail and build new worlds in each one. This attention to detail and ability to drop the reader into a new time period had me immersed in the story throughout. Despite knowing very little about the two protagonists, I came to really care for their wellbeing and this also kept me reading.

Overall I don’t want to say too much about this book as it is told in quite a fragmented way and the plot is something that you should experience as you read. I think if you like Becky Chambers’ work, this will be perfect for you.

5 out of 5 stars!

By turns utterly heartbreaking and wondrously joyful, this novella does so much in such a short space. Telling the story of Red and Blue, two agents on opposite sides of the time war, the narrative weaves their love story through letters that start playfully and grow more and more heartfelt as the book progresses. Spanning thousands of years and multiple versions of history, this truly is a love story for the ages and it is beautifully crafted throughout. My only complaint is that at times, the narrative does become a little hard to follow, but if you just allow yourself to be swept away by the beauty of the letters, this becomes pretty incidental. Overall, a gorgeous exploration of what those in love will do to win out against all odds. Highly recommend.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

A surreal, beautiful story of love letters and war against a backdrop of ever-shifting timelines. Not so much a novel (or novella) as a shard of poetry that occasionally stabs you in the face.

This Is How You Lose The Time War is an epic love story, co-written by two award-winning science fiction/fantasy authors, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

The story centres on two soldiers from opposing factions - Red from the Agency and Blue from the Garden - who are engaged in a war that spans both space and time. It is their mission to move back and forth between parallel realities in the multi-verse, and up and down different threads of time, manipulating the worlds they find in order to get an edge over the opposing side in the future. Sometimes their interventions are of a bloody nature, but at other times their tamperings are extremely subtle.

Red and Blue are both very skilled at what they do - both highly valued by their own opposing factions - but in the overall scheme of things, neither side seems to be gaining a lasting advantage over the other.

Over time, Red and Blue become aware of each other, among the multitude of other operatives, and this sparks a correspondence of sorts between them. These letters are of an unusual kind, made of the fabric of the realities in which they find themselves, as they have to exist in a form that must endure until they fall into the way of their opposite number, without being discovered by anyone else.

Their messages begin as a way to taunt each other, but they develop into something much deeper, and they end up sharing the most personal details about their lives and desires. In time, Red and Blue come to love each other and rely on their correspondence, even though they have only ever seen each other from afar, but they live in constant fear that their relationship will be discovered - and Red is sure that someone is watching her at every turn. Can two such different beings, who are on opposing sides in an eternal war ever have a future together? Well, I am not one for spoilers, so you will have to read this book to find out!

This Is How You Lose The Time War is a complex many layered novella that manages to pack an awful lot into its 209 pages. It is a lyrical, and rich journey through time, which draws on myth and history to weave a magical backdrop for an intimate love story between two genetically enhanced agents of war.

I must admit that it is difficult to get your head round what is happening some of the time, as the story bats backwards and forwards between Red and Blue's messages to each other, but this did not actually matter one jot, because the connection between our two players is so utterly compelling - and it has to be said that the ways the messages are crafted between Red and Blue are particularly inventive and original. There is the most beautiful of twists towards the end of the story too, which left me breathless.

It is hard to classify this book as being in a particular genre, but I would say this is much more of a science fiction tale, rather that a fantasy novel, with an epic love story thrown in - and it ended all too soon. I was left wanting more and hope these two eminent authors put their heads together to produce another book soon.

This intense romance in a futuristic science fiction setting was an absolute delight to read. I will say beforehand that generally I like my world-building in SFF to be well described, and while that wasn't the case with this novella - I feel spending time on world-building would dilute the impact of the story anyway - it more than made up for that lack with an engaging storyline and some mind-blowing twists. The story begins with opposing agents in a Time War making contact, and they exchange letters, the content growing from professional admiration to full-blown heart-eyes love. We don't know much of their origins, and I won't even begin to understand the worlds they come from, but the bare bones of it is that Red comes from a technologically inclined, like cyborgified faction, while Blue comes from an enviromentally-inclined faction, and not the tree hugging kind.

Both sides have progressed in different directions, and use time agents to manipulate events to their advantage, with events and plans sometimes centuries in the making, over a rope of time and threads they control; Blue and Red being their respective best agents are frequently crossing paths as they change the course of events. Being from opposite sides, however, means that their letters to each other have to be untraceable. The interesting bit is how their letters are written - each one creatively delivered in every medium possible, sometimes in code in the bark of a tree grown over decades, sometimes in the form of a seed that has to be eaten. Each new letter speaks to their growing attraction for each other, even as they still both have doubts as to the motive of the other. As they go forth, they decide how to keep the other other from their organization, and if it is ever possible for them to be together.

This book is inexplicable in many ways, and it is difficult to say how it makes so much sense even when I didn't understand the rules of this world, but about the romance I can say this - it is intense, obsessive and not sweet, yet it leaves you aching for more of it. Finally, all I can say it - this is book you just have to experience for yourself because nothing I say could come close to describing its brilliance.

"Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading."

I find it hard to describe the novel, without spoiling anything, but all I can say it is beautifully written and well-thought out. Its definitely a different type of SF book I have read and I can see why it is popular among those who have read it.

4 stars

An outstanding read, balanced and beautiful and well-considered, with the greatest of love stories at its heart. My full review is available at Strange Horizons via the submitted link!

How do you begin to describe something like This Is How You Lose the Time War? From the synopsis, you might think that this novella is just another one in a recent stream of works focusing on time travel. You might think it quirky and unusual, but nothing more beyond that. You would be, without a doubt, sorely mistaken. Because what This Is How You Lose the Time War is not just a story about time travel and futuristic war; it is also a story about two protagonists engaged in a game of cat and mouse; it is a story told through lyrical writing you very rarely see in fantasy these days; and most importantly of all, it is a love story through letters across a battlefield and a war seemingly without end.

Red, an agent of the Commandant, finds a note on a battlefield that simply reads: Burn before reading. So begins a tale of love across the many strands of time, in which she must, to all intents and purposes, defeat Blue, while carrying on their illicit correspondence. Except… this can’t go on forever, can it? After all, in a war, someone has to win it, right?

What This Is How You Lose the Time War does better than pretty much any other book I’ve read this year, is transport you into a world that is almost like ours but not quite. There are historical references here, sure, but they are fragmented and they ultimately carry little weight. What truly matters is the love story between Blue and Red and how El-Mohtar and Gladstone tackle it is through breathtaking language, almost like poetry in its approach. It does not make for an easy read and despite being a novella (though I feel 200 pages is about the same as what I would expect from an older fantasy novel), it still manages to feel meaty, its metaphors beautifully woven together in a tapestry of language that never failed to captivate me. It is also the kind of book that benefits from re-reads, because initially I spent a lot of time trying to discern the plot (and for all its simplicity, there is real depth here, particularly once events escalate in the third act) and perhaps not enough time really enjoying the prose.

Blue and Red have such distinctive voices and I really enjoyed the way the authors tackled the conflict between them, the way the Agency and the Commandant pushed for technical supremacy and how the Garden was very much a biopunk utopia (or was it?). There is a constant tug between them, trying to convince each other of the supremacy of their cause (or so it seems), until the feelings develop and are revealed. It feels, at times, like a fairytale, like a love story told in hushed whispers, but the intensity of it seemed to leap off the page. I would find myself reading and re-reading entire paragraphs, savouring the feel of them in my head and revelling in the beauty of the scenery, the games that Red and Blue played with each other, the feelings that their letters could evoke. Epistolary styles aren’t particularly prominent in fantasy and it is easy to see why: there is a lot of scope for them to sound forced, stilted, for the narrative to end up serving the delivery method. Not so for This Is How You Lose the Time War. Instead, the letters become more personal, less boastful, more underpinned by genuine human emotion. By the end, I was invested in their story, I wanted them to succeed.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is my first exposure to both Max Gladstone’s and Amal El-Mohtar’s writing and it is perhaps the best way to see it in action. This novella is a genuine tour de force from a pair of writers at the top of their games. I would recommend it to fans of time travel, of sapphic literature, of epistolary novels, of romance novels, but also to people looking for a book that doesn’t shy away from any attempts at being a ‘difficult’ read.

Time travel! Two sides at war, and the exchanging of letters between an agent from each side. They'd be killed if discovered. Even if their letters were taunts only and contained zero information, even if they remained faithful to their cause and hated the other with every particle of their being... the very idea they'd exchanged letters means the trust has been broken, and so their lives would be forfeit.

They are Red and Blue. Red fights for Agency, and Blue for Garden.

The chapters alternate between brief snapshots of their lives, and the letters they leave for each other. The earlier letters are stilted, as they have never done such a thing before and only know what letters are like from having been told of them. To write themselves from scratch is another thing entirely, and Red writes out her structure to keep her on track. They grow from here though, and we see the inventive ways they ensure they are for their eyes only. 

What I love about this book is it shows perfectly how when it comes to time travel there is a different type of plot entirely. There is still their own linear narration as they keep up with each other over their countless lives, but it shows how if you do something well, you can give readers a novel in any form or flavour you see fit. And El-Mohtar and Gladstone have done that perfectly here. This is a work of art, and perfection, and was a joy to read. 

Some of the lines are just so brilliant. 'A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet'.

'Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.'

'...succeeds beautifully, brutally.'

Can we please have another?

Red and Blue are agents on opposing sides of a war conducted across time itself. They are perfect spies, virtuoso killers, artists when it comes to manipulating timelines. Each of them has the sole purpose of ensuring their side wins.

And then they fall in love.

The novella This is How You Lose the Time War is a collaboration between Max Gladstone, author of the Craft Sequence among other things, and Amal El-Mohtar, best-known for her short fiction and poetry (and a personal fave of mine). The story showcases the best of both authors: El-Mohtar’s lush prose and referential richness and Gladstone’s facility with vivid characterisation.

And my goodness, it’s twisty and odd in all the right ways. This is How You Lose the Time War is a gorgeous fantasia in time, as we chase Red and Blue through a colourful myriad of possible worlds.

This story is all about the anachronisms. Except that of course nothing in this story is technically an anachronism, because time travel.

It’s precisely because time travel that this story feels like all of time—all of what ever was and what ever could be—smashing into one another all at once. Red and Blue spend lifetimes on fantastical worlds, fulfilling improbable quests, only to find a letter from the other, written and encoded in the most far-fetched way, talking about the etiquette of correspondence in the 19th century, about wax seals (and dear god, that amazingly terribad joke…), and about Chatterton.

This is How You Lose the Time War is the most perfect epistolary—that is, a story told through correspondence—I’ve ever read. While there is material outside them, the letters between Red and Blue themselves are the showpieces of this book. They are rampant with imagery and with metaphor, a sweetly intoxicating flirtation that grows into deep and passionate love between the two main characters.

Of course Red and Blue are Romeo and Juliet. Not only in the sense that they belong to opposing sides of a war, but also that they live alongside death, dance with it, circle closer and closer to it with every risk they take to communicate with one another.

So if you enjoy a slow burn, well, friend, have I got a book for you. The romance between Red and Blue is like nothing more than a game of chess. They make their assay, take their risks, and they wait for the other to move. Because of the war, and their opposing sides, even when Red and Blue can admit they’ve fallen for one another, they still have miles to go.

This novella is compulsive reading. Desperately rooting for these two crazy kids to make it absolutely absorbed me. It’s heartachingly beautiful. I never wanted to put it down. It’s everything I wanted it to be.

2.5 stars.
I wanted to love this book its hype was huge. And I adore Max Gladstone's writing. However, this book started off slow and dragged. I was really thinking of giving up on it but by the halfway point the pace had begun to pick up. And I was becoming more attached to Red and Blue.
The best part by far of this novella was the romance between Blue and Red, and I did enjoy the plot twist.

Overall though I don't I loved this book as much as a lot of others. But that's okay you can't love everything.

This was kind of confusing at the start as I did not realise it was the 2nd book in a series or was it told in letters. Once I realised that I loved this and how the story was told. The characters were okay but could have been written a little bit clearer. The letter format was often clear and meant that the book felt shorter than it actually it was. The book was well written and explored well and I would pick up more by this author as this was an intense and enjoyable read.

Some things are more important than winning”

This was a very beautiful love story. It was also difficult to make sense of, but very original.

A tour de force of lyrical, extravagant prose, the slim novel "This is How You Lose the Time War" packs in more phantasmagoric action and time-travel magic than most hard sci-fi books of three times the length. Red, a time manipulating agent of a mechanistic future, and Blue, a similar agent for an organic future, tussle across time lines in a dizzyingly sketched multiverse, before commencing to exchange covert letters of challenge and then admiration and then more. The two authors, both feted under their single names, concede no ground to the reader, throwing us into a barely comprehensible brew of worlds and times and technologies. Not a sparkling word or phrase is wasted. I’m still reeling days after gasping through the time-twisting complexity of a double climax that had my jaw dropping. I’m reminded of the times of Samuel Delaney, the sheer joy in the weirdest of worlds drawn in poetry. Amongst the best science fiction I’ve read this year.

from the technical point of view, i can tell you that the writing is really beautiful, and layered, and sophisticated; it creates an amazing atmosphere

from the point of view of someone whose friends read the book & raved about it, i can tell you that this is a story of spies from the opposing sides of a time war who fall in love through the most unreal letters & circumstances; who doesn't love sapphic enemies to lovers, right?

from my point of you, i can only tell you that i don't think i was the right audience; i found it too dense to comprehend at times & kind of exhausting. i'm pretty mad about that because i was all ready to love this book!

i'll try to give it another shot when i'm in a more suitable mood but... yeah :<<

This Is How You Lose The Time War is a lot of things. But if you’re just here for the topline, the first of those things is that it’s really, really good. It’s an artful blend of hard-science fiction, high-concept ideas, and emotionally fraught, honest, affecting characterisation, laced through with a complex, believable, thoughtful romance seasoning. And all of this is wrapped up in an epistolary format, as a pair of agents on different sides of a struggle that threatens to tear apart causality start leaving each other notes.

Those writing the letters are referred to only as Red and Blue. They feel almost like concepts more than names. One lives in the boundaries of a timestream dominated by technology; there are sweeping dataspheres, constant communications, constant monitoring, soaring data edifices, that sort of thing. The other comes from a timeline which feels more organic, where the organic is at the heart of philosophy and civilisation. Both parties are utterly immersed in their conflicting realities, and in their conflict up and down the twisting ladder of time. The prose is fluid and lyrical where it needs to be, and intentionally not when it shouldn’t be – as Red and Blue try the hardest thing, to actually speak to each other. That mastery of language makes this book such a pleasure to read, it’s untrue.

It’s helped by the fact that both central characters are so very likable. That said, travelling up and down the time-stream as they do, disrupting each other’s work by, say, arranging for Lincoln not to be assassinated, or for Caesar to die a little later than we think of as correct, has given them both a rather distinct perspective. It bleeds from the letters they send each other, the sense of the long view, of waiting for the right moment to do the right thing, and watching the results cascade outward in a multiplicity of changes. Each of their exchanges is an exercise in elegance, and the reader sits on either side of this burgeoning relationship, which mixes up that temporal vision with a more immediate, though no less strange, sense of desire.

I’d be hard put not to call this a love story. But the growth of affection between Red and Blue is a gradual thing at the same time that it’s a white-hot furnace. It’s a sense of slowly growing trust, and a willingness from each to protect the other, to try and live up to each other. They’re a strange pair, but the spaces between the words, the hidden truths they don’t dare write down, are an inferno in the minds eye. These are people. Strange, wonderful people, with a passionate intensity that is no longer restricted to the worst. Because they’re such fun to read. The letters between Red and Blue are full of wry observance, of a closeness, an affection which resonates throughout, and feels like the backbone of the text.

The worlds they explore are wonders in their own right. Though we only see snapshots, still there are flashes of the familiar and the strange, to keep us on our toes. And each is vividly, lavishly described, each jump to a new period carries the same depth and heart as the one which came before. The future, or futures, our future (or futures) are there as well, of course. And they are both as wonderful and terrible as one might expect. To read of the dance of Blue and Red is to be swept up in it, to feel their hungers and their fears, to live their careful steps between realities, to understand the craving and the energy which drives them back and forth through time, and away from and toward each other.

This is a novella that is, as you can probably tell, rather difficult to describe. What the authors, fictional and otherwise, have wrought here is an intricate tapestry, or a sparkling jewel of a narrative. Its complicated, passionate, compelling work. It’s a thoughtful, powerful work, which has interesting things to say, and interesting questions to ask – and it does so while telling a fantastic story. You should read this. If it does nothing else, it will make you feel.

Thanks to Quercus Books and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

Where does one even begin when reviewing a book like this?

In the simplest of terms, this book is about Red and Blue. Two interdimensional agents who fight in an endless war across time and space. That sounds like a really cool premise because it IS.

After a mission, Red finds a letter from Blue and from here an unconventional sapphic love affair blossoms. The rest of the story is told from their letters to one another. It's never quite made clear what form of life Red and Blue are. Certainly they can take the form of humans, but their relationship transcends the bounds of humanity and time so it actually doesn't really matter.

This is a gorgeously written and imaginative novella that is utterly unconventional in its style. It certainly won't be for everyone and some people will undoubtedly find it a tad pretentious. When I was reading this book I was reminded of the writing and narrative style I encountered in Catherynne Valente's "Deathless" so if lyrical and poetic language and ambiguities are not your thing...maybe skip this one.

What I really enjoyed about this book was how ridiculously invested I became in the relationship between Red and Blue, they were just so gosh darn romantic. I'm partial to the enemies to lovers trope as it is, but this story just took it to the next level. It's a short read but I lingered over it more than I would a full length novel just so I could savour the experience. Let's face it, if Madeline Miller says it's good you know it's going to be amazing. Perfection *chef kiss*

Red is a member of the Agency, led by the Commandant, a entity of technology and determined to rewrite the timeline in its own favour. Blue was nurtured by the Garden, a rival agent in a war that spans countless centuries and endless timelines. This is the time war - a fight for dominance between equals and opposites. These two agents fight both the long and the short game - a quick murder here, a change of direction there, or influencing entire cultures in order to gain a brief victory.

Then, after one mission, Red finds a letter marked 'burn before reading' and an unlikely correspondance, written across the stars and entire universes, begins between these two rivals.

What I particularly loved about this novella was the imagination involved on so many levels - creating worlds that were both similar and different to our own, one based in a distant history, the another in the stars - and the myriad of creative ways that Red and Blue used them to communicate.

And beyond that is the lyrical, building romance between Red and Blue. Not only does it make me happy that this is a f/f romance, but on the other hand it makes no difference to the quality of the story whether they were m/m, robot/robot or any other combination - it's about two beings from opposite sides that are so different that they are the same. And finding that connection that you didn't realise your were missing, even though they are off-limits (opposing factions in a war than spans the whole of time), can change from enemies to romance.

More importantly, it's admiration for each other as enemies, turning to romance, but done well.

I also loved that this sci fi romance novella could manage all of that on the barest outline of imagination - so much of TIHYLTTW is based around the reader's imagination too - it almost doesn't matter what the politics are around the Agency and Garden, or how strings and strands and threads and braids work - they add to the fairytale glow and imaginative creativity that is down to the reader to embrace.

Five glorious stars - and an eagerness to read again (although I shouldn't just yet).

'All good stories travel from the outside in'.

How to describe this book? It's brilliant. It's evocative. It's heartbreaking. It's tender.

Above all, it's beautiful.

In a multiverse not far from here, we find two agents - referred to simply as Red and as Blue. They act for different factions in a Time War: Red works for The Commandant, Blue is an agent of Garden. Both women are human, and more than human. They have formidable combat abilities, endurance, strength and they are able to move backwards, forwards and sideways through space and time, up and down the different braids, the timelines, that denote victory or defeat in the endless war. They are perhaps not born but created, their role to interfere, tip events one way or another - killing a leader, ensuring a technology develops or a trade route opens, something that will cascade down the braids, changing outcomes and winning their side an advantage in some remote age.

What the war is about, who the factions are and why they exist, isn't clear and doesn't need to be. We don't care who wins. What matters is that Red and Blue are eternal opponents, sworn and committed enemies, true believers in their causes - in the service of which they necessarily cross and recross each other, jostling for advantage. And as skilled and intelligent agents, they begin exchanging messages. They are taunting, scoring points. And, perhaps, one is trying to turn the other.

But hard earned, if grudging, respect leads to mutual understanding - perhaps, across all the timeline s in the multiverse, only Red and Blue can truly understand Blue, and only Blue can truly understand Red. Understanding leads to a sort of friendship (with no loss of commitment: "We will still win!") Friendship deepens and leads to... something like love. No, actually, to love.

Channeling the spirit of every story of star-crossed lovers (yes, there are references to Romeo and Juliet) el-Mohtar and Gladstone have spun here a simple, yet deep and ever so beautiful story of doomed love, often poetic ('Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein', 'It feels good to be reciprocal, eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet'), profoundly moving and fundamentally human and true - alongside the weird, eon-spanning SF setting.

And there is more. The authors like nothing more than puncturing their own balloon with a pun or a reference ('no road-met random monster', 'strangling that evil old man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse'). And they won me with the observation that 'Even an immortal can only ride the [London Underground] Circle Line so long' (though it can feel like it sometimes).

It's a short book, one to read in a sitting, growing into the love between the two women, despairing at the fate that has made them what they are, the more so for the conflict being so shrouded and seemingly pointless.

A profound and glorious story, wonderfully written, uplifting even while sad.

VERY strongly recommended.