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This Is How You Lose the Time War Hardcover – July 16, 2019
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NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA
ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.”
So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space.
Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they’re the best, and they’re alone.
Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it?
A tour de force collaboration from two powerhouse writers that spans the whole of time and space.
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGallery / Saga Press
- Publication dateJuly 16, 2019
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-101534431004
- ISBN-13978-1534431003
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This book has it all: treachery and love, lyricism and gritty action, existential crisis and space-opera scope, not to mention time traveling superagents. Gladstone's and El-Mohtar's debut collaboration is a fireworks display from two very talented storytellers." -- Madeline Miller, award-winning author of Circe
“Poetry, disguised as genre fiction. I read several sections out loud — this is prose that wants to be more than read. It wants to be heard and tasted.” -- Kelly Sue DeConnick, author of Captain Marvel
“An intimate and lyrical tour of time, myth and history, with a captivating conversation between characters—and authors. Read it.” -- New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi
“A time travel adventure that has as much humanity, grace, and love as it has temporal shenanigans, rewriting history, and temporal agents fighting to the death. Two days from now, you've already devoured it.” -- Ryan North, New York Times Bestselling and Eisner Award winning author of How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time Traveler
"A twisting, sapphic time travel fantasy love story that never stops surprising: El-Mohtar and Gladstone have written the ultimate in enemies-to-lovers romance.” ― Booklist, Starred Review
*"Exquisitely crafted... 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. El-Mohtar and Gladstone pack their narrative full of fanciful ideas and poignant moments, weaving a tapestry stretching across the millennia and through multiple realities that’s anchored with raw emotion and a genuine sense of wonder. This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities. ― Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Seditious and seductive, lush and lustrous, allusive and elusive, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR is one of those rare stories where one struggles to decide whether to heap more praise upon its clever structure and prose or its brilliant ideas and characters.”
—Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Tenderness, danger, daring, wit — Time War has them all... In other words, these pages are strewn with myriad delights. -- Nisi Shawl
About the Author
Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, which Patrick Rothfuss called “stupefyingly good.” The sixth book, Ruin of Angels, was released September 2017. Max’s interactive mobile game Choice of the Deathless was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared on Tor and in Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. John Crowley described Max as “a true star of 21st-century fantasy.” Max has sung in Carnegie Hall and was once thrown from a horse in Mongolia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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
Product details
- Publisher : Gallery / Saga Press; First Edition (July 16, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1534431004
- ISBN-13 : 978-1534431003
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #56,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #15 in Epistolary Fiction (Books)
- #307 in Time Travel Fiction
- #2,973 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic: her short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, while her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. 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 writes the OTHERWORLDLY column for the New York Times Book Review. She's the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, an epistolary time-travelling spy vs spy novella. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

MAX GLADSTONE is a fencer, a fiddler, and Hugo Award Finalist. He has taught English in China, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Max lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston. He is the author of the Craft Sequence (Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, Last First Snow, Four Roads Cross, and Ruin of Angels).
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I had two complaints about the book. One is that it seems a bit surprising for the enemies to fall so passionately in love when their only interaction is letters and operations against each other.
The other is about time-travel itself. This complaint is not unique to this book. It has to do with the pseudoscientific way a lot of scifi justifies time travel, using some variant of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, the many-worlds interpretation turns out be the most intractably deterministic theory you can imagine. Basically, all possible sequences of events exist, have always existed and always will exist. Furthermore, there is no way to hop from one "world line" to another.
All that to say I lost interest about 30% through the book, because I realized there wasn't any plot. However, something resembling action picks up in the second half, and by the end the story makes a powerful point about taking a direction that defies the system and creates a better future. That ending made the rest of it worthwhile.
The poetic and dreamlike writing style of the authors perfectly captures the ethereal nature of time travel, and the narrative alternates between Red and Blue's perspectives, giving the reader a glimpse into their respective worlds and personalities. The book is short but packed with imagination, and the stunning descriptions of different settings and scenarios will leave you in awe.
The only downside of the book is that at times the narrative can be hard to follow, and the non-linear structure of the story can be confusing. However, this is a minor issue that doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the book.
Overall, "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is a unique and beautiful take on the concept of time travel, and it will leave you pondering about the nature of love and loyalty. It's a must-read for anyone looking for a thought-provoking and romantic science fiction novel.
They are also, at various points, tree rings, magma, and bubbles. (Seal guts are involved at one point too.)
This epistolary novella begins as a contest between two time travelers, the preeminent members of competing organizations bent on shaping the multiverse to fit their respective visions. Red works for the Agency, a technologically advanced version of humanity that’s implanted her with weapons and armor and pseudo-skin that can change form as required. Blue works for Garden, an organic hivemind whose members have evolved natural corollaries to these tools of destruction and deception. When deployed against each other, Red and Blue are “equal and opposite reaction[s],” as Blue terms them at one point, “a microcosm … of the war as a whole.”
Their struggle is the next thing to endless. Both are essentially immortal, capable of playing the longest of long games in one “strand” (i.e., potential timeline) after another. They might live out an entire life advising a variation of Genghis Khan, for example, and then skip to a resulting future to alter the outcome of a space battle, before circling back to a connecting past to ensure that the wind in an underground labyrinth “whistles over the right fluted bones,” so that “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.” Sometimes these actions seem noble, like immunizing Native Americans centuries before contact with Europeans. But in other missions Red and Blue massacre millions.
And it wears. Early in the time war, it was probably easy for these adversaries to shrug off the psychic toll levied by their work—why bother with morality when there are multitudes, when London has so many incarnations they’re labeled with numbers and letters? Yet after eons of plotting and maneuvering and killing, the war goes on, and Red and Blue have little to show for their service.
Except their rivalry.
One-upping each other becomes a new challenge. Not just in the field—although they do plenty of showing off there too (subtle and otherwise). But after Blue rubs in a victory by sending Red a letter that can only be read by burning it, Red responds with a message that can only be read by boiling. From there, they concoct increasingly elaborate ways to continue their correspondence. In the process, their relationship changes, morphing from competition to curiosity to … something more.
It’s a fascinating tale.
The prose borders on poetry—mostly to the good, although I occasionally had trouble following the action. And I’m not sure all the time travel mechanics add up. (If Red and Blue can pinpoint their communications to the exact time and place the other will receive them, how have their parent organizations not figured out when and where to assassinate each other’s agents?) But I loved the ways El-Mohtar and Gladstone play with the concept of letters. “There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?” muses Red at one point—words you can reread to take you back to a specific moment, no matter how long it’s been since you first read them.
The paper can vary. Same with the ink. But the transportive quality of letters endures. I only wish we wrote more of them in our current “strand.”
Wow. Beautiful, intriguing, wonderful.
Time travel always gets my head in a knot.
I was expecting more from the worldbuilding but once you let go and just focus on red and blue relationship the book becomes very good.
Recommended for sci-fi and romance fans.
Top reviews from other countries
Then it just clicked into place just after halfway through. The words were spun in such a way that kept me reading, long past times when I should have stopped. A finale so perfect that not to have read it would have been a crime in itself.
I loved this book. The characters were perfect as they fell in love through ingeniously created letters to each other; the traps, the Shadow, just all of it.
It's difficult to know how a book will grab you at the end. Had this book been longer, I might have stopped reading it. I'm glad I didn't, and I would certainly recommend you read it.
For the way this book caught me in the second half, I would have awarded five stars, "but I reserve a star, to encourage reach exceeding grasp."
The main positive I found was the stunning prose. I have never read a more beautifully written book. It reads like poetry, like Shakespeare. The words ooze from the page like a meandering river of molten gold. For that alone I can recommend this book to at least experience this! The descriptions just make you feel good, the effect the same as looking at a beautiful painting or a sunset over the ocean.
The problem is, the abundance of flowery language can border on whimsical and pretentious, especially when prioritised at the expense of the plot. Eventually it becomes exhausting and overbearing. I found myself becoming frustrated with the lack of focus on the story and subsequently not appreciating the beauty of the prose.
On the plot, for the first half of the book at least, it feels pretty vague. Where in most stories the plot is at least in part a driving force, it feels more of an afterthought here, more of a “how can we fit a story around the interactions of these two characters and base it on time travel?” It is a backdrop for the story of the two characters’ developing relationship, which is the only thing looked at in detail.
The time travelling aspect for example, which was one of the main marketing sells, wasn’t explored in any depth. There was even a point where an Apatosaurus (a genus of Sauropod – not one of the dinosaur groups theorised to have feathers) was described as “ruffling its feathers” which suggests that the time travel wasn’t taken all that seriously. There was no real explanation into how it worked, what the agents were doing exactly or what the characters of Red and Blue were really trying to achieve (other than playing their part in the minimally described war between the Garden and the Agency in influencing and guiding their preferred version of history.) These historical and future events could have been explored to add more substance to the book, especially given in the synopsis the characters are apparently “hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions.” Within the space of about 5 letters they seem to have disregarded the importance of this war and their role within it, consumed by their blossoming romance. Despite this, the romance is a plus point in many ways and it is enjoyable to witness a mutual intelligence and appreciation for the nuances of life drive two opposing agents towards one another. It is at times heartwarming, and heart wrenching, and you do definitely feel a strong desire to see Red and Blue find happiness and a solution to their situation.
The series of letters, which is what most of the book consists of, is a novel technique and certainly has its merits. It does stop it reading like a traditional novel/novella though which may affect the feeling of immersion for some readers. As mentioned above this also limits the worldbuilding or overall depth of the story and world this is taking place in. It’s certainly possible that the authors never intended to do much worldbuilding or give much information about the world, clearly choosing to focus on the characters. For me personally, I just couldn’t fully enjoy it due to an enticing and intriguing time travel war only being a backdrop to the story. If you don’t care about the events or the Time War so much as this character relationship told within it, this could be a 5 star read for you. And for those who don’t mind a divergence from the story but are looking for a page turner, after the 50% mark, it does get more exciting and more things do actually happen in the story. Just don’t expect a great deal of focus on anything past the love of the two characters or for their thoughts to be on anything but the other one of them.
For readers looking for the ‘fast paced’ ‘tour through time,’ ‘science fiction adventure’ described in this book’s description, you’d probably be better looking elsewhere.
This is essentially a love story, but with a key difference, in that the two protagonists do not even exist in the same spatiotemporal dimension.
Blue and Red, as they are rather functionally named, are operatives from opposing camps in a multi-dimensional battle that spans millennia and realms, which is little hard for me to grapple with at first.
Blue is from “Garden,” which suggests nature, growth and life itself, while Red is from “Shift,” whose business appears to be to tamper with or engineer the “natural” course of history. We are told that Garden thinks “Shift relies too much on tricking time, evading it, skimming across its stones, dipping its distasteful toes, thinking to divert its currents by rippling its surface.”
Red, an agent of Shift, carries out these diversions by being an assassin of sorts, picking out those individuals whom the Agency determines should not be there, in order to redirect or “braid” the strands of time together.
She traverses these dimensions, moving “upthread” or “downthread” in her missions. Red reports to a Commandant, and though all the characters take on female pronouns, they do not always assume (human) physical forms.
They are bonded by the letters they send each other, which are embedded in a seed, in a fallen star, etc. But the fact that Red and Blue are time travellers also mean things don’t always have to be linear, so when one is forced to betray the other, this quality gives the whole story enough twists to keep the reader captivated.
This is an unusually entertaining sf novel that is intelligent yet does not set out to obfuscate with its cleverness. The writing is top notch, and the inventive vocabulary is so aptly used to convey refreshing insights. I only wish there was more of it to read, when i reached the end of it.
Anyway, the main plot is about time travel, two different authorities sending agents into the timeline to mess with things in the hope that they'll come out on top. Two particular agents, referred to as Red and Blue all the way through the novella, start a correspondence alongside their efforts to mess with each other's plans and end up falling in love. That's a very bare bones recital of a much more twisty plotline that really can't be explained without spoiling the whole thing.
In the end, I think for me the problem I had was that I liked the time travel aspect but really couldn't care less about the romance storyline, and then the whole thing was told in language that was at points intentionally opaque. If I wanted verbiage I needed to untangle, I'd stick to literary fiction, so I'm really not the audience for this novella. Best of luck to both authors, whose individual works I've really enjoyed, but this book just makes me have to work way too hard and I'm not here for that.











