Tragicomedy Rich in Imagination, Action, Time Travel, Emotion, Drama, and Lyrical Prose

Don’t start out reading This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone if you’re sleep deprived, as I did. Nothing written in the book’s early pages seemed comprehensible to my brain, addled by lack of sleep, regarding what I was about to embark upon. I actually felt angry, and was thinking, “What the heck am I reading?!” I got back to reading after a few hours sleep, and it was a game changer for me.  

The Amazon book blurb tells us the book is “Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers” There are two main characters, Red and Blue; Max wrote all of Red, and Amal wrote all of Blue. Editors at Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, in their 3/11/20 author interview “This Is How You Produce The Time War Part 1: Powder Scofield interviews Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone” describe the book: “It’s an intense, lyrical, tragicomic novella about two elite warriors, Red and Blue, who strike up a correspondence across the millenia and across enemy lines.” Both warriors appear to be female, and they often travel across time. At one point Red says to Blue, “Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.” 

Once well rested, as you begin to read, allow the narrative to pull you forward. It is told in the form of letters between Red and Blue, situated within the context of their ongoing developing relationship and their lives apart. Make no assumptions, experience the story as it unfolds, let the tale wash over you without worrying about your need to know more than what the words on a page reveal. Your reading involvement will do one of two things. One: you will become hostile, stop reading, immediately write a scathing review cursing the fact there is not a zero star option, and thank the Lord you borrowed the book from a library and didn’t lose money, adding insult to injury. One star reviews on Goodreads represent 3% of the book’s total ratings. Two: you will feel joy for the beauty and fierceness of the emerging relationship between two timeless entities enmeshed in a story of a foreign universe so gripping it would have kept ancient cave dwellers glued to the fireside as it was being told in the oral tradition, only to return again each night listening to the music of the fire’s hiss and crackle, a soundtrack behind spoken words so riveting they wished it would never end.

I’m still asking myself a little bit, “What did I just read,” but so glad I stayed for the story, rich in imagination, action, emotion, drama, and prose I found lyrical at times, like an epic poem of love and heroism, even in the Acknowledgment where there was this nugget from Amal El-Mohtar, “Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.” 

I am imagining these authors walking on a beach when they retrieve a large floating object of unknown origin from the churning sea, open it, and discover scrolls of ancient paper, manuscripts of a story, perhaps in written in Greek, that serves as a springboard to this book. If you are adventurous in spirit, and willing to suspend your disbelief in order to ride the undulating swells of a narrative wherever it takes, you may enjoy it greatly. 

Note: This book was optioned for a series and the screenplay has been written by the authors. I always recommend first listening to the free audiobook sample or reading the ebook sample to see if it might appeal to you prior to making a financial commitment.