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    This Is How You Lose the Time War
    This Is How You Lose the Time War
    This Is How You Lose the Time War
    Ebook181 pages2 hours

    This Is How You Lose the Time War

    By Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

    4/5

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    • Time Travel

    • Identity

    • War

    • Love

    • Survival

    • Epistolary Novel

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Time Travel Romance

    • Enemy Mine

    • Pen Pals

    • Epistolary Romance

    • Power of Friendship

    • Power of Love

    • Chosen One

    • Enemies to Lovers

    • Sacrifice

    • Betrayal

    • Letter Writing

    • Friendship

    • Espionage

    About this ebook

    * HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA *

    “[An] exquisitely crafted tale...Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay...This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.

    Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment 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, 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.

    Editor's Note

    Hugo-winning novella…

    This Hugo Award-winning novella contains the chaos of all of time and space within its beautifully short, never-ending love story. Two women, named Red and Blue, fight for opposite factions in the ceaseless time war, flowing from the past to the future, from timeline to timeline. Through a series of letters sent via tea and lava and other delightful delivery systems, Red and Blue fall for each other, and combine for some of the best purple prose around.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJul 16, 2019
    ISBN9781534431010
    Author

    Amal El-Mohtar

    Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author, editor, and critic. Her short story “Seasons of Glass and Iron” won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and was a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Aurora, and Eugie Foster awards. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and The New York Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared on Tor and Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. She is presently pursuing a PhD at Carleton University and teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. She can be found online at @Tithenai.

    Read more from Amal El Mohtar

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    Reviews for This Is How You Lose the Time War

    4/5

    1,968 ratings123 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a heart-breakingly beautiful love story that spans lifetimes. The writing is stunning and the story is powerful, making readers think and feel. It is almost painfully beautiful and demands an immediate reread. The book is filled with metaphors and emotion, and the enemies to lovers trope is masterfully executed. While some readers found it confusing at the beginning, the love between the characters kept them interested. Overall, this book is a delightful, witty, and heartwarming read that is highly recommended.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I really liked this one. Different than my usual read, but I liked it!
    • 2/5
      This book was trying SO hard to be fragmented and lyrical and confusing and romantic and beautiful. For me it only succeeded in being confusing and pretentious.
      I did not like the romance and how it tried to be super fierce and wild, Red and Blue were at best projecting wildly. I liked the clever tricks with the hidden letters and the scene with the seal actually made me chuckle. Other than that I was mostly somewhere between bored and vaguely annoyed.
      Definitely not a book for me.
    • 5/5
      Oh, this beautiful, ridiculous, over-the-top Romeo-and-Juliet love story is too much its own remarkable thing to be put into words.
    • 5/5

      This sci-fi, epistolary novel follows two soldiers--Red and Blue--serving two sides of a war and their furtive correspondence. It starts with taunting letters, but grows into something more.

      Each chapter ends with a letter clandestinely delivered in a creative way, for example through a seal's innards or by a very precise arrangement of bones and wind to whistle a voice message. The book introduces confusing terminology and tech at the beginning that isn't elucidated until later in the book; I am fine with that. It manages to communicate or show the world without explaining the world. I enjoyed the ending.

      It's short and sweet, I have no complaints.

    • 5/5
      It has been years since I read a science fiction novella (or novel) that was as good in as many ways as This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

      This is an immersive book–we are taken directly into a complex and unknown world with little expository explanation. I didn’t know who Red and Blue were, nor why they were fighting a war in time. The descriptions of action were fuzzy at best. I almost gave up, and would have if the book was longer.

      Then, subtly, slowly, I was drawn in to this curious epistolary relationship between Red and Blue, two major players on opposite sides of a generations long, galaxy spanning war in time.

      This Is How You Lose the Time War is all about love and erudition and language and poetry and the obsession that drives two people in love under impossible circumstances. El-Mohtar and Gladstone make the book complex and poetic, literary and romantic. Their collaboration is perfect, their words matched to the tone and setting. Red and Blue riff off each other with perfectly constructed styles using metaphors and imagery with cultural and literary references. This epistolary novel is as complex in structure as the time strands that Red and Blue traverse and manipulate in their generations long war over interstellar distances.

      Although the time war has little detail or explanation, it provides the connection between lovers, a challenge for them to overcome, and crucially, the structure for their redemption.

      We feel deeply for Red and Blue and we feel their precarious situations amid the uncertainty they live in where time and worlds are mutable. They question their own motives and actions, and those of others, while regaling each other with romantic letters transmitted through subtle and abstruse steganography.

      In alternating narrative strands and in the letters of Red and Blue, El-Mohtar and Gladstone build a world, they build lives, they build romance and they create magic.

      Read it.
    • 1/5
      Tell me if this sounds interesting: there's a character named Red and a character named Blue. Red works for a technologically advanced organization and uses technology and makes technology-related metaphors. Blue works for an plant-focused organization and uses plants and makes plant-related metaphors. When they fall in love, Red gives Blue nicknames related to the color blue. In re Blue gives Red nicknames related to the color red.

      I hope that does sound interesting, because that's most of what the book is. Besides those surface-level traits, there's not much else to grab onto. The organizations the characters belong to are almost entirely the same, except that one of them decants its agents and the other one grows them. The main characters themselves have little to differentiate them from one another, other than the fact that one is red and the other is blue. Their actions as soldiers in the time war are largely page-filler between receiving letters from one another, heavy on set-dressing but quite forgettable. The letters aren't anything noteworthy either. The main characters' narrative voices are indistinguishable, making it difficult to tell which one is even writing at any given moment (until they start calling their beloved pomegranate or something like that). Though the letters themselves are written on unique materials--a jar of water, a seed--they all have fairly similar contents, using flowery language to say that Red is red and Blue is blue.

      This Is How You Lose the Time War is almost delightful in its simplicity. It's so simple that if you cut the whole book down to a paragraph, it probably wouldn't lose anything, because its premise contains everything notable about it. It says that love is passionate and war is hell like those are shocking new ideas, when I'm not sure I've ever read a book so dedicated to not doing anything to surprise the reader. Its literary-sounding language can't hide the fact that it completely lacks the complexity and sense of curiosity that make literature interesting. It's not a book I recommend to anyone.
    • 5/5
      "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is an excellent epistolary novel with well-crafted language and a fun philosophical outlook.

      This is exactly the sort of thing I want to read. Max and Amal have reminded me pleasantly and painfully of some letters I have sent and received in years gone by.
    • 5/5
      Dueling intimate protagonists test limits of fluid alternative timelines.
    • 3/5
      It built nicely over the course of its length and had some emotional and poetic moments, but it was hampered a bit by the similarity of the written style for both narrators. I wish the co-authors had tried to distinguish the tones and verbal characteristics more to show that the two point of view characters were very different people. I actually started to wonder if they were the SAME person in different timelines, which seems to negate the overall point of the book.
    • 4/5
      I have no idea how to rate this one. It was weird, but at times really beautiful. The language was over-the-top but I thought it fit the story. I can’t wait to hear what my book club thought of it!
    • 3/5
      Interesting and stylized novella about two rival agents, Red and Blue, who are on opposite sides of a civilization-level war over manipulation of timelines. Both are agents who make subtle changes or start and end wars in order to move the forces of the future toward their desired ends.
      That's a little vague- but so is the book! The specifics of the Time War are never more than gestured at, as the point of the story is how these two agents grow to know each other through their letters- first gloating, and eventually loving, as each discovers that in the other they have found a soulmate.
      As a love story, it's kind of cool. As sci fi, the details are too slim for me. Quick read though, I enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      Definitely an odd and evocative story, with a lot of quirky ideas and excellent execution. The emotional qualities and writing style really colours the narrative vividly to make for a fun, digestible read. I personally find some of the finer details of the story to be questionable, and I really wish Red and Blue had more distinct voices. However, they didn't hamper the experience enough to make the experience unenjoyable, just less than ideal for me personally. Still a solid read.
    • 5/5
      Stunning. Absolutely one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.
    • 4/5
      This really is as beautiful as everyone says. I think this deserves a reread, to maybe wrap my head around some of the scifi elements. The growing relationship on two sides of an infinite war is heartachingly developed, you can't help but root for them. Also, any book that quotes the jabberwocky can't be half bad.
    • 4/5
      Agents for opposing groups in a never-ending war across time, Red and Blue have always been well-matched as opponents. But when one of them finds a letter that reads Burn before reading, it starts a correspondence that will irrevocably alter their lives and have an impact on the war as well.

      This book has been on my TBR for ages, even before it went viral a year or two ago. It recently crossed my feed on a list of books described as no plot, all vibes and while it isn't quite without plot the description is apt. El-Mohtar and Gladstone have just as much fun providing brief descriptions of locales across time and space where Blue and Red find themselves as they engage in the war and send letters back and forth. A quick read that will be a particular delight all those who enjoy timey wimey narratives.
    • 5/5
      Red and Blue are on opposite sides of a war throughout time. They jump back and forth, in and out of different timelines to engineer the future their side wants, or foil their enemy’s plan to do the same. They start exchanging letters, first to taunt each other, but then they fall in love and must decide what future they would really like to have, and what they’re willing to do to get it.

      A very sweet and short novel. I loved the format, which is a few pages about when in time the character is on their mission, how they find the latest letter from the other character, and then the text of the letter. The perspective of the first half of the chapter is fairly detached 3rd person and then the text of the letter is so intimate you can feel it in your bones. I don’t think the text supported these two people falling so in love through just a few letters but the letters make you feel it’s true anyway. Because we never see Red or Blue writing the letters, only receiving them, it’s not so much a story about falling deeply in love as it is about being deeply loved. Not a lot happens through most of the book, since Red and Blue eventually jump out of any timeline they’re in, until the end, which is very satisfying. The vibe really reminds me of the Marvel tv show Loki, if you’re into that.
    • 5/5
      5 stars
      WOW. beautiful, poetry, love across time and space and universes. if it’s not like this I don’t want it. I want this made into a movie.

      characters: 5
      plot: 5
      writing: 5
    • 5/5
      Beautifully tangled and confusing. Poetic. Sad and romantic. I think this one can't be parsed too closely, although I'm tempted to do so.
    • 5/5
      Watching the rapport build and unfold between Red and Blue is just a thing of beauty. This book could easily have been two or three times the length but the prose is so tightly written while still being rich and evocative. It lives up to all the hype!
    • 5/5
      Superb writing. Story is good too.
    • 3/5
      2023 book #47. 2019. Two agents, on opposite sides of a time war, start exchanging letters after missions and start caring more about each other than their cause. Hugo Award winner. A bit hard to follow but worth it in the end.
    • 4/5
      Inventive but it took me a couple goes to get in to.
      Also a very tiny book to pack such a punch.
    • 4/5
      It took me longer than I expected to get into this (no reader, you're not wrong, the prose is sometimes overwrought) but then I did and I was overawed. Thanks for making me cry.
    • 5/5
      I heard many people praise this book previously and always took it with a grain of salt, but they were right. This story is amazing. At times it is very abstract, which I think works with the time travel aspect. The relationship reminds me a little bit of Good Omens, especially the TV series version. This is a blessed queer book, perfect for Pride Month. Someday, I will read it again.
    • 5/5
      Maybe This Can Help You
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    • 2/5
      I liked the concept of this book, but to be honest I think the letters became a bit tedious for me. It is beautiful writing, but I just didn’t feel like the relationship between red and blue was very authentic. A bit of a struggle to get through!
    • 2/5
      Structurally an ill constructed work. The plot is not clear and depends in an outside explanation.
      The language usage pretends to be poetic but is quite elementary.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful. Read reviews and it did not disappoint. A lovely adventure worth reading (in one sitting!)
    • 5/5
      After a few chapters, I had to revisit the book again because I somehow couldn't distinguish who Red and Blue were fighting for. I also can't imagine how they look like. But the little allusions to their colors... I love those. The passion between these two just overwhelms me in the best way. And it ended in the most beautiful way. This is one novella I know I'll revisit soon.
    • 5/5
      This has to be my favourite book ever. It is simply perfection.

    Book preview

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

    Cover: This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

    Amal El-Mohtar

    This Is How You Lose the Time War

    This book has it all. —MADELINE MILLER, New York Times bestselling author of Circe

    Max Gladstone

    Logo: Book Club Favorites. Reader’s Guide

    Seditious and seductive. —KEN LIU

    CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

    This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Saga Press

    Publisher’s Notice

    The publisher has provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management (DRM) software applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This ebook is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this ebook, or make this ebook publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this ebook except to read it on your personal devices.

    Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: simonandschuster.biz/online_piracy_report

    .

    To you.

    PS. Yes, you.

    When Red wins, she stands alone.

    Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world.

    That was fun, she thinks, but the thought sours in the framing. It was clean, at least. Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agency’s arranged—the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible. She’s come to knot this strand of history and sear it until it melts.

    She holds a corpse that was once a man, her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She lets go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronze to depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red.

    After a mission comes a grand and final silence. Her weapons and armor fold into her like roses at dusk. Once flaps of pseudoskin settle and heal and the programmable matter of her clothing knits back together, Red looks, again, something like a woman.

    She paces the battlefield, seeking, making sure.

    She has won, yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasn’t she?

    Both armies lie dead. Two great empires broke themselves here, each a reef to the other’s hull. That is what she came to do. From their ashes others will rise, more suited to her Agency’s ends. And yet.

    There was another on the field—no groundling like the time-moored corpses mounded by her path, but a real player. Someone from the other side.

    Few of Red’s fellow operatives would have sensed that opposing presence. Red knows only because Red is patient, solitary, careful. She studied for this engagement. She modeled it backward and forward in her mind. When ships were not where they were supposed to be, when escape pods that should have been fired did not, when certain fusillades came thirty seconds past their cue, she noticed.

    Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

    But why? Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.

    Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does, for Red. Her fellow agents do not feel the same, or they hide it better.

    It is not like Garden’s players to meet Red on the same field at the same time. Shadows and sure things are more their style. But there is one who would. Red knows her, though they have never met. Each player has their signature. She recognizes patterns of audacity and risk.

    Red may be mistaken. She rarely is.

    Her enemy would relish such a magic trick: twisting to her own ends all Red’s grand work of murder. But it’s not enough to suspect. Red must find proof.

    So she wanders the charnel field of victory and seeks the seeds of her defeat.

    A tremor passes through the soil—do not call it earth. The planet dies. Crickets chirp. Crickets survive, for now, among the crashed ships and broken bodies on this crumbling plain. Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.

    It won’t, and neither will they.

    On a span of blasted ground, she finds the letter.

    It does not belong. Here there should be bodies mounded between the wrecks of ships that once sailed the stars. Here there should be the death and dirt and blood of a successful op. There should be moons disintegrating overhead, ships aflame in orbit.

    There should not be a sheet of cream-colored paper, clean save a single line in a long, trailing hand: Burn before reading.

    Red likes to feel. It is a fetish. Now she feels fear. And eagerness.

    She was right.

    She searches shadows for her hunter, her prey. She hears infrasonic, ultrasound. She thirsts for contact, for a new, more worthy battle, but she is alone with the corpses and the splinters and the letter her enemy left.

    It is a trap, of course.

    Vines curl through eye sockets, twine past shattered portholes. Rust flakes fall like snow. Metal creaks, stressed, and shatters.

    It is a trap. Poison would be crude, but she smells none. Perhaps a noovirus in the message—to subvert her thoughts, to seed a trigger, or merely to taint Red with suspicion in her Commandant’s eyes. Perhaps if she reads this letter, she will be recorded, exposed, blackmailed for use as a double agent. The enemy is insidious. Even if this is but the opening gambit of a longer game, by reading it Red risks Commandant’s wrath if she is discovered, risks seeming a traitor be she never so loyal.

    The smart and cautious play would be to leave. But the letter is a gauntlet thrown, and Red has to know.

    She finds a lighter in a dead soldier’s pocket. Flames catch in the depths of her eyes. Sparks rise, ashes fall, and letters form on the paper, in that same long, trailing hand.

    Red’s mouth twists: a sneer, a mask, a hunter’s grin.

    The letter burns her fingers as the signature takes shape. She lets its cinders fall.

    Red leaves then, mission failed and accomplished at once, and climbs downthread toward home, to the braided future her Agency shapes and guards. No trace of her remains save cinders, ruins, and millions dead.

    The planet waits for its end. Vines live, yes, and crickets, though no one’s left to see them but the skulls.

    Rain clouds threaten. Lightning blooms, and the battlefield goes monochrome. Thunder rolls. There will be rain tonight, to slick the glass that was the ground, if the planet lasts so long.

    The letter’s cinders die.

    The shadow of a broken gunship twists. Empty, it fills.

    A seeker emerges from that shadow, bearing other shadows with her.

    Wordless, the seeker regards the aftermath. She does not weep, that anyone can see. She paces through the wrecks, over the bodies, professional: She works a winding spiral, ensuring with long-practiced arts that no one has followed her through the silent paths she walked to reach this place.

    The ground shakes and shatters.

    She reaches what was once a letter. Kneeling, she stirs the ashes. A spark flies up, and she catches it in her hand.

    She removes a thin white slab from a pouch at her side and slips it under the ashes, spreads them thin against the white. Removes her glove, and slits her finger. Rainbow blood wells and falls and splatters into gray.

    She works her blood into the ash to make a dough, kneads that dough, rolls it flat. All around, decay proceeds. The battleships become mounds of moss. Great guns break.

    She applies jeweled lights and odd sounds. She wrinkles time.

    The world cracks through the middle.

    The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire ink in a viny hand at the top.

    This letter was meant to be read once, then destroyed.

    In the moments before the world comes apart, she reads it again.

    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

    A little joke. Trust that I have accounted for all variables of irony. Though I suppose if you’re unfamiliar with overanthologized works of the early Strand 6 nineteenth century, the joke’s on me.

    I hoped you’d come.

    You’re wondering what this is—but not, I think, wondering who this is. You know—just as I’ve known, since our eyes met during that messy matter on Abrogast-882—that we have unfinished business.

    I shall confess to you here that I’d been growing complacent. Bored, even, with the war; your Agency’s flash and dash upthread and down, Garden’s patient planting and pruning of strands, burrowing into time’s braid. Your unstoppable force to our immovable object; less a game of Go than a game of tic-tac-toe, outcomes determined from the first move, endlessly iterated until the split where we fork off into unstable, chaotic possibility—the future we seek to secure at each other’s expense.

    But then you turned up.

    My margins vanished. Every move I’d made by rote I had to bring myself to fully. You brought some depth to your side’s speed, some staying power, and I found myself working at capacity again. You invigorated your Shift’s war effort and, in so doing, invigorated me.

    Please find my gratitude all around you.

    I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards, unable to keep the letters on a page; instead you must absorb them, admit them into your memory. In order to recall them you must seek my presence in your thoughts, tangled among them like sunlight in water. In order to report my words to your superiors you must admit yourself already infiltrated, another casualty of this most unfortunate day.

    This is how we’ll win.

    It is not entirely my intent to brag. I wish you to know that I respected your tactics. The elegance of your work makes this war seem like less of a waste. Speaking of which, the hydraulics in your spherical flanking gambit were truly superb. I hope you’ll take comfort from the knowledge that they’ll be thoroughly digested by our mulchers, such that our next victory against your side will have a little piece of you in it.

    Better luck next time, then.

    Fondly,

    Blue

    A glass jar

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