This is how you lose the time war

Амаль Эль-Мохтар, Макс Гладстон «Как проиграть в войне времён»

Как проиграть в войне времён

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Повесть, 2019 год

Язык написания: английский

Перевод на русский: — Е. Шульга (Как проиграть в войне времен) ; 2022 г. — 1 изд.

Награды и премии:

Номинации на премии:

Издания на иностранных языках:

Доступность в электронном виде:

Hidalgo, 18 июля 2020 г.

Эта история о двух путешественниках во времени, которые начинают как представители двух пост-сингулярных противоборствующих сторон (технократической и биоцентрической), но в процессе постоянно обмениваются посланиями и влюбляются друг в друга. Повесть написана попеременно от лица двух героев — сначала небольшое описание их подрывной деятельности в разных временах и континентах, а потом очередное послание. Послания эти чаще всего выполнены в какой-то изощренной форме, например, в виде кода из узелков на веревке или из чаинок на дне чашки.

Чтение требует довольно высокой концентрации. Сюжетные переходы рваные, и читатель должен постоянно включать воображение, и вдумчиво осмысливать детали контекста. Чего уж там, первые процентов 10-15 от повести я вообще с трудом понимал, что именно происходит вне писем — стало попроще лишь к последней трети, где персонажи перестали прыгать друг за дружкой по разным эпохам. Авторы начитаны и эрудированны, и вплетают множество смыслов и контекстов в описания — но чтобы насладиться этой книгой, важно уметь наслаждаться стилем в ущерб содержанию. Но опять-таки, поэтика и глубина языка на месте, поэтому повесть найдёт своего читателя.

Ложным будет и впечатление, что это история о противостоянии — на деле это эпистолярная повесть о любви двух персонажей.

Fantalogia, 15 июня 2022 г.

Рэд и Блу – лучшие спецагенты противоборствующих сторон. Они путешествуют во времени и во множестве параллельных вселенных кроят историю на свой лад. А точнее так, как это выгодно их стороне – технократическому Агентству или биогенному Саду. Их общение начинается с невинного обмена саркастическими сообщениями, полными взаимных подколок, но постепенно тон посланий меняется на более доброжелательный. А соперничество перерастает в глубокое взаимное чувство.

Очень люблю тему путешествий во времени, сложные мозгодробильные головоломки и все такое, поэтому ожидания от книги были самые радужные! Но увы не срослось.

Несмотря на интересную задумку, ожидаемая научная основа и темпоральные теории здесь отсутствует. Не будет ни временных парадоксов, ни зацикленных петель. Вместо технической части авторы сосредотачиваются на описании главных соперниц.

Слог авторов богат и поэтичен, насыщен цветистыми метафорами и культурно-историческими отсылками. С одной стороны, это украшает произведение, выделяя его из ряда прочих.

Но с другой стороны, необходимость постоянно продираться сквозь пышные заросли авторского красноречия сбивает читателя.

Например, вот цитата:

Питание — довольно мерзкая штука, согласись. Я имею в виду саму концепцию. Когда ты привыкаешь к гиперпространственным станциям дозарядки, к солнечному свету и космическим лучам, когда практически все твои представления о красоте сосредоточены в сердце великой машины, трудно польститься на такую концепцию: костями, торчащими из смазанных слюной десен, измельчать выросшие в грязи объекты в кашу, которая пройдет сквозь влажную трубку, соединяющую твой рот с мешком кислоты, плещущейся под сердцем.

А вот романтическая линия мне очень понравилась тем, что не имеет ярко выраженной сексуальной подоплёки. Речь в большей степени идет о единении душ или, если угодно, разумов. Это очень необычный подход, редко встречается в книгах.

Что в итоге? Книга непростая и не мэйнстримная. Сложно её рекомендовать, но вероятно она может понравиться любителям фантастики и одновременно неторопливых интеллектуальных текстов.

This is how you lose the time war

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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 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 g
love, 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.

A glass jar of water boils in an MRI machine. In defiance of proverbs, Blue watches it.

When Blue wins—which is always—she moves on to the next thing. She savours her victories in retrospect, between missions, recalls them only while travelling (upthread into the stable past or downthread into the fraying future) as one recalls beloved lines of poetry. She combs or snarls the strands of time’s braid with the finesse or brutality required of her, and leaves.

She is not in the habit of sticking around, because she is not in the habit of failing.

The MRI machine is in a twenty-first-century hospital, remarkably empty—evacuated, Blue observes—but never conspicuous to begin with, nestled in the green heart of a forest bisected by borders.

The hospital was meant to be full. Blue’s job was a delicate matter of infection—one doctor in particular to intrigue with a new strain of bacteria, to lay the groundwork for twisting her world towards or away from biological warfare, depending on how the other side responded to Garden’s move. But the opportunity’s vanished, the loophole closed, and the only thing there for Blue to find is a jar labeled READ BY BUBBLING.

So she lingers by the MRI machine, musing as she does on the agonies of symmetry recording the water’s randomness—the magnetic bones settled like reading glasses on the thermodynamic face of the universe, registering each bloom and burst of molecule before it transforms. Once it translates the last of the water’s heat into numbers, she takes the printout in her right hand and fits the key of it into the lock of the letter-strewn sheet in her left.

She reads, and her eyes widen. She reads, and the data get harder to extract from the depth of her fist’s clench. But she laughs, too, and the sound echoes down the hospital’s empty halls. She is unaccustomed to being thwarted. Something about it tickles, even as she meditates on how to phase-shift failure into opportunity.

Blue shreds the data sheet and the cipher text, then picks up a crowbar.

In her wake, a seeker enters the hospital room’s wreck, finds the MRI machine, breaks into it. The jar of water is cool. She tips its tepid liquid down her throat.

My most insidious Blue,

How does one begin this sort of thing? It’s been so long since I last started a new conversation. We’re not so isolated as you are, not so locked in our own heads. We think in public. Our notions inform one another, correct, expand, reform. Which is why we win.

Even in training, the other cadets and I knew one other as one knows a childhood dream. I’d greet comrades I thought I’d never met before, only to find we’d already crossed paths in some strange corner of the cloud before we knew who we were.

So: I am not skilled in taking up correspondence. But I have scanned enough books, and indexed enough examples, to essay the form.

Most letters begin with a direct address to the reader. I’ve done that already, so next comes shared business: I’m sorry you couldn’t meet the good doctor. She’s important. More to the point, her sister’s children will be, if she visits them this afternoon and they discuss patterns in birdsong—which she will have done already by the time you decipher this note. My cunning methods for spiriting her from your clutches? Engine trouble, a good spring day, a suspiciously effective and cheap remote-access software suite her hospital purchased two years ago, which allows the good doctor to work from home. Thus we braid Strand 6 to Strand 9, and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.

Remembering our last encounter, I thought it best to ensure you’d twist no other groundlings to your purpose, hence the bomb threat. Crude, but effective.

Address the reader—done. Discuss shared business—done, almost.

I imagine you laughing at this letter, in disbelief. I have seen you laugh, I think—in the Ever Victorious Army’s ranks, as your dupes burned the Summer Palace and I rescued what I could of the Emperor’s marvelous clockwork devices. You marched scornful and fierce through the halls, hunting an agent you did not know was me.

So I imagine fire glinting off your teeth. You think you’ve wormed inside me—planted seeds or spores in my brain—whatever vegetal metaphor suits your fancy. But here I’ve repaid your letter with my own. Now we have a correspondence. Which, if your superiors discover it, will start a chain of questions I anticipate you’ll find uncomfortable. Who’s infecting whom? We know from our hoarse Trojans, in my time. Will you respond, establishing complicity, continuing our self-destructive paper trail, just to get in the last word? Will you cut off, leaving my note to spin its fractal math inside you?

I wonder which I’d rather.

My regards to the vast and trunkless legs of stone,

Red puzzles through a labyrinth of bones.

Other pilgrims wander here, in saffron robes or homespun brown. Sandals shuffle over rocks, and high winds whistle around cave corners. Ask the pilgrims how the labyrinth came to be, and they offer answers varied as their sins. Giants made it, this one claims, before the gods slew the giants, then abandoned Earth to its fate at mortal hands. (Yes, this is Earth—long before the ice age and the mammoth, long before academics many centuries downthread will think it possible for the planet to have spawned pilgrims, or labyrinths. Earth.) The first snake built the labyrinth, says another, screwing down through rock to hide from the judgment of the sun. Erosion made it, says a third, and the grand dumb motion of tectonic plates, forces too big for we cockroaches to conceive, too slow for mayfly us to observe.

They pass among the dead, under chandeliers of shoulder blades, rose windows outlined by rib cages. Metacarpals outline looping flowers.

Red asks the other pilgrims nothing. She has her mission. She takes care. She should meet no opposition as she makes a small twist this far upthread. At the labyrinth’s heart there is a cavern, and soon into that cavern will come a gust of wind, and if that wind whistles over the right fluted bones, one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with child in a storm, and so it goes. Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche. Little flash to such an assignment, less challenge, so long as she stays on script. Not even a taunt to disturb her path.

Did her adversary—did Blue—ever read her letter? Red liked writing it—winning tastes sweet, but sweeter still to triumph and tease. To dare reprisal. Every op since, she’s watched her back, moved with double caution, waiting for payback, or for Commandant to find her small breach of discipline and bring the scourge. Red has her excuses ready: Since her disobedience she’s been a better agent, more meticulous.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

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.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant 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, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the…

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

15 июня 2022 г. 10:28

4 Неторопливая интеллектуальность и хитросплетения многоходовок

Очень люблю тему путешествий во времени, сложные мозгодробильные головоломки и все такое, поэтому ожидания от книги были самые радужные! Но увы не срослось.

Несмотря на интересную задумку, ожидаемая научная основа и темпоральные теории здесь отсутствует. Не будет ни временных парадоксов, ни зацикленных петель. Вместо технической части авторы сосредотачиваются на описании главных соперниц.

Слог авторов богат и поэтичен, насыщен цветистыми метафорами и культурно-историческими отсылками. С одной стороны, это украшает произведение, выделяя его из ряда прочих.

Но с другой стороны, необходимость постоянно продираться сквозь пышные заросли авторского красноречия сбивает читателя.

Например, вот цитата:

Питание — довольно мерзкая штука, согласись. Я имею в виду саму концепцию. Когда ты привыкаешь к…

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

I figured out nonrepresentational art in the spring of 2009 at the Tate Modern. I was there with my mother and a close friend, and the friend asked my mother–

(Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.)

–what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit it if I didn’t know what Jackson Pollock was on about (which I didn’t then and still don’t), but it has proved to be valuable advice all the same. There’s a particularity to artistic stylization — in modern art, in poetry, in your swooshier prose writing — that requires a resonance between creator and consumer, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re nowhere.

If you’re thinking I have used up a lot of words in a row as a preface to admitting that I didn’t love This Is How You Lose the Time War, you are perfectly correct. But I didn’t love it in a way I find interesting and want to think more about. All signs pointed to me and this book being a perfect match. It’s a semi-epistolary time travel romance about a woman called Red from a sciencey time army and a woman called Blue from a magicky time army, and they do time battles and thwart each other’s plans and fall in love. On paper this should have been great for me. I love it when a murderbird character finds herself in disconcerting possession of an emotion, and this book had two murderbirds.

On the other hand, this book isn’t so much a time travel story or a romance story (although it is both of those things) as it is a vehicle for swooshy prose. Here is what the prose is like:

She stops when she finds the letter.

The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?

The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.

She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.

I am on record as being generally more interested in story-forward books than prose-forward ones, and you may accept that as a statement of my own starting point. But regardless of your feelings about books that have “prose delivery vehicle” as a prominent goal (they are frequently not my cup of tea, Marilynne Robinson), they play a high-risk game in the same way that nonrepresentational art or poetry do. I can appreciate the hard work that went into Jackson Pollock’s paintings all day, but they will never stop me in my tracks the way Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons did at the Tate Modern. I was rocked back on my heels by those paintings. Poetry functions the same way: Whether you understand the sense of it on a vocab-and-syntax level is often irrelevant to how emotionally impactful you find it.

We spoke on podcast recently about how utterly subjective hope is, in books — how the same book can make one person feel exhausted and miserable, and another person rejuvenated and hopeful. I believe that any piece of art that has as a main goal the evocation of emotion and mood narrows its audience, purely because it is functioning on a different level of engagement that slightly bypasses the “interpret the words and their meanings” level and gets into something far harder to articulate.

When a book or a poem or a piece of art works like this for you, it really really works. It feels like something beyond the intellectual experience of reading, or even the typical emotional experience of reading. It’s more visceral, like the book has gone fishing for exactly you and lodged its hooks in your soft tender heart and now you are just being dragged along, willy-nilly, wherever it wants to take you. It’s intense. Maybe you think about it for years and years afterward, like I do about this passage from White Is for Witching:

The very-very-personal-ness of this kind of writing and how it hits you and how it’s meant to hit you does truly mean that it’s Not for Everyone in a way that can be quite hard to predict. You can appreciate the above passage on a sentence level and a meaning level, you can get it without that passage slamming into you like a freight train, the way it does to me. As I’ve said, This Is How You Lose the Time War described in bullet points is such a me book that it’s almost comical; but you can’t bullet point how noticeable prose will make you feel. I’m not even convinced you can bullet point how it’s meant to make you feel. Leah Bobet 1 said something so sensible about this recently:

Relatedly, I’ve realized after years what it is I *like* about poetry.

There’s a lot of good in a form where our interior lives exist without pressure for explanation or translation.

— I came in like a breaking ball (@leahbobet) July 15, 2019

How can cover copy tell you whether a prose-forward story will speak to your interior life, or a collection of poetry? It’s impossible, even impossibler than marketing materials typically are in predicting what you’re going to like. Self-serving as it may seem to say this in a post about a book I didn’t like that litrally everybody else in the world seems to adore, it also isn’t a case of anybody having messed up. The authors didn’t make a misstep. I didn’t not get it. It’s just that the match between them and me didn’t occur. Their elegant, complicated, weird swooshy writing didn’t resonate anything in me.

Note: I received an ARC of this ebook from the publisher for review consideration. This hasn’t impacted the contents of my review.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone || Book Review

If there is one book that has interesting reviews online, it is This is How You Lose the Time War. Prior to reading the book, all I knew about it was that it is about time travelling and people love it even though they didn’t understand the book.

I finally read it in January with my book club and I have to say: it was hella captivating. You will see many quotes in this post because I annotated a lot and also a spoiler-filled section later because I HAVE to share what I felt when reading the book.

This is How You Lose the Time War synopsis

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant 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, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That’s how war works. Right?

Content warnings: Animal killing, Gore, Rape (mentioned), Self-harm, Suicide (mentioned), Torture, War/Violence

my review

Since it was a group read, I read it only on readalong calls with other club members every weekend. If I had read it alone, I would have probably finished it in one sitting instead of three Saturdays.

This is How You Lose the Time War drops us right into the story with no explanation or warning and goes from there. The reader has to read multiple chapters to understand what is going on and even then they might be confused.

I felt like I had a proper grasp of the book only about 50% into it. Since I had not read the actual synopsis, I had zero comprehension of the story in the beginning. My understanding grew very slowly in comparison to the pace of the story. But once things started clicking properly in my head, I was enthralled by the book.

Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.

The story is fast paced from the start. After we’re dropped in, the book does not wait for us to understand before picking up the speed. It makes for some interesting chapters (or the entire book) while we are confused about what is going on.

As someone who doesn’t like slow-paced stories, this was right up my street. Towards the end, I couldn’t read it fast enough and didn’t take a pause. I wanted to know what happens next and next and next.

The time travel aspect did not disappoint. The two main characters travel upthread (back in time) and downthread (forward in time) to make small changes which create big impacts because of the butterfly effect. It was really interesting to see them jump “strands”, compare the different strands of time, and make waves.

With every time travelling story, I want one big twist or revelation. There are so many opportunities with time travelling. This book took the opportunity and had a really good twist at the end. It took a fact that was quietly intriguing throughout the story and made it into a huge thing. All of the hints fit together perfectly. I GASPED.

The book had me in a chokehold, basically.

Hope may be a dream. But she will fight to make it real.

A great book has to have great characters and This is How You Lose the Time War had the perfect protagonists. Red and Blue are time travelling agents in rival companies. Neither of them are human but they often take human-like bodies. They travel in time and make waves in order to deliver what their agencies want, but they also sabotage moves made by the rival agency.

Red and Blue are one of the most talented in their respective agencies and their paths cross often. They start sabotaging and taunting each other, leaving creative letters which lead to more. I didn’t know that there was romance in the book so when the hints came, my book club had to confirm it for me. This book was impressing me more and more as I read it.

The relationship development between Red and Blue was slow, entertaining, and full of yearning. This book delivered a brilliant sapphic enemies/rivals to lovers romance. It was awesome to see them pretending to be enemies and being super talented at their job while writing letters FULL of pining. I was annotating heavily towards the end.

To read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrage and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.

The interesting thing about the characters and the romance is that the characters are not really women so it’s a “sapphic” romance only because they use she/her pronouns. Red and Blue definitely don’t take on heteronormative roles in their relationship as well. Some parts of their personality do make them butch and femme but they’re in a dimension of their own.

They also upstage the heteronormative time travelling romance trope that we generally see. Red and Blue sabotage each other and come up with very inventive ways of sending/reading letters. I looked forward to seeing what they do in every chapter. At the end, after the twist, everything cranks up and we truly see the depth of what time travelling can do. It was amazing.

overall

This is How You Lose the Time War is a book that I will remember and need to reread now that I have a better understanding. The story, the characters, and the writing will keep me awake on random nights for years to come.

It is only around 200 pages but packs a ton. I highly recommend it because I believe it is one of the best romance books. Whether you understand the plot or not, you will enjoy the story.

discussion with spoilers

If you haven’t read the book and don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read this section! Click here to skip to the bottom of this post.

I generally don’t have spoiler sections for book reviews like my KDrama reviews but I have to include it here because I want to talk about that ending. The last third of the book was a crescendo. It amped up the yearning and the brilliance in both Blue and Red.

Just in case you’re not on the same page as me, here’s the ending explained along with my thoughts:

After Blue dies from the poison created by Red and her faction, Red basically loses herself in grief. One day, she comes upon a painting which shows the scenario of Blue’s death almost exactly as it happened. The difference is the missing poison, letter, and the being in the painting has red hair.

Red remembers bits of Blue’s letters and remembers that the poison was tailored for Blue’s faction and wouldn’t have any affect on Red and her fellow agents. She also remembers that while Garden shelters its agents as they grow up, there was an incident during Blue’s former years due to which there was a hole in her brain. A hole which can be used.

Blue, as a complete Garden agent, cannot survive the poison. And Red cannot enter Garden’s areas because she does not have Garden’s genetic make up. But they have scattered pieces of themselves in time through their ingenious letters.

A letter is more than text. She reads Blue into her: tears, breath, skin—most of these traces were scrubbed away, but a few remain. She builds a model of Blue’s mind from the words she left; she molds her body to the letters’ measure. Almost.

Taking the wild chance, Red travels upthread (back in time) and retraces her own footsteps. The end of chapter 22 says “then she climbs up and goes seeking.” Red is the Seeker whom we’ve been seeing and wondering about until now. This was when I gasped. The revelation blew my mind.

After Past Red and Past Blue read and disposed of the letters, Red/the Seeker collects the pieces. She eats and absorbs pieces of Blue’s letters because Blue’s letters contain parts of Blue, and hence, parts of the Garden genetic make up.

When Past Red caught onto someone following her and thought it was the Commandment having her followed, it was actually her future self. Red laid traps for herself and later fell into her own traps, she fought herself in the shadows, and felt paranoid because of herself. Seeker Red also tries to reach out to her past self but can’t reveal herself without tainting past experiences, and hence Past Red thinks she’s in danger.

Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation.

I was shocked by the news and what it meant for all the points until then. But if you think about it, it was obvious in a way. No one except Blue was as talented as Red and hence no one else could have followed Red through everything. No one else knows Red intimately and can keep up with her travel. In hindsight, it is clear. But I didn’t even consider it as the possible outcome before.

The best part is how brilliantly Blue was written. There were hints all along of Blue subtly planting this idea in Red’s mind. As Seeker Red snatches up all of Blue’s letters, she reads them again and finds clues. How long ago had Blue planned it? She was never going to kill Red.

The fact that we got reveals which altered our perception of whatever happened and, at the same time, watch Red get reveals which alter her perception of everything so far was mindblowing. The plot and the writing played out so well in chapter 23.

Red may be bad, but to die for madness is to die for something.

Red becomes Blue, basically. Or a mixture of herself and Blue. She enters Garden “as a letter, sealed in Blue” and finds young Blue. Red gives Blue a taste of the poison which would be used far into the future and also some of herself that is resistant to the poison. Red essentially vaccinates Blue against the poison she created.

Reading that scene was like reorienting everything I knew about the story. And that, my friends, is what a makes a great time travel story. While the revelation about Red did come somewhat linear in time, where she was herself and then later becomes something else, Blue was different from the start. Or you could say that she changed at the end only for everything from the beginning to be changed.

So. Blue, in the end, survived because a part of her was Red. Both Blue and Red are “tainted” now, both between two polar opposite things. When Red got out of Garden and was captured by her Agency, Blue got her out with—of course—a letter. The book ends with them deciding to fight together against both their factions. They will face their biggest challenge and have fun.

Shall we prick and twist and play the braid until it yields us a place downthread, ned the fork of our Shifts into a double helix around our base pair?

Shall we build a bridge between our Shifts and hold it—a space in which to be neighbours, to keep dogs, share tea?

let’s chat!

Have you read This is How You Lose the Time War? If yes, what did you think of the book? What did you think of the title in relation to the story (and the ending)?

If not, have I convinced you to give the book a chance?