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| This is How You Lose the Time War |
Book title:
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Author:
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Genre:
Science fiction
Published: July
16, 2019
209 pages
My rating:
3/5
“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. This begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival time-traveling agents Red and Blue. What begins as a taunt grows into something more, but if they are caught, their bond means a death for them. Because around them, the time war around them rages on.
This is How You Lose the Time War is a science fiction novel by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I listened to this book as an audio book in Finnish translation. I don’t know if it was the (otherwise competent) translation or the format, but I didn’t connect to the story. If I had read this book in original language instead of listening to it, I might have enjoyed it a little more. The concept certainly was interesting, but the execution felt lacking.
The story is told from two points of view with letters interspersed between third-person narration. Red is an agent of the technologically focused Agency and Blue the agent of nature-focused Garden, and their job is to move back and forth in time, changing history and future in accordance with what their bosses want. However, it is not entirely clear what their bosses want, and that makes it hard to care for what is happening. This may be intentional, as in the end, we are supposed to care more about the main characters than their agencies’ objectives.
However, we never get very close to the main characters either. The third-person narration feels distancing and the lack of concrete details about the world and the lack of depth in the characters left me feeling detached. It doesn’t make sense how Red and Blue would fall in love through letters without ever meeting each other. This is a very short book, and the story is over before it fully begins.
If you like books that combine the poetic language of literary fiction with technological concepts of high science fiction, you might love this book. I would have preferred something more concrete, and therefore I’m giving this book three stars.
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