Pride Month Picks This is How You Lose The Time War

Letter writing is a lost art.

There is something so intimate about dedicating part of your day to draft the perfect correspondence to someone, picking out which ink colours, what pen, is it time to break out the fancy paper or which wax seal to hold this tiny sliver of time just to share some small moment with them. There’s the words left unwritten, the careful way you or I might craft a very specific narrative to someone. I was on a walk and saw a mushroom, it reminded me of you because you care about them so very much. Remember that place we went for food once?-I found another place with similar vibes. There’s a different kind of knowing someone when your primary way of interacting is through letter than being able to talk to them in the moment. Letters operate as liminal space, a transition from the past to an always possible future (since each letter hopefully invokes another).

I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I came to this book through a general twitter game dev recommendation pipeline, and so far I haven’t been steered wrong yet. It’s a pretty slim book-it flirts somewhere between novel and novella and is a perfect snack when conquering a 300+ page novel is a bit much. I don’t think I’ve really read anything yet by either author, which I want to remedy after finishing their collaboration.

So what is This is How You Lose the Time War about? It’s a sapphic enemies to friends to something more slow burn set during the aforementioned war. Red and Blue are the characters we follow (of course they’re on opposite sides of the war) with their factions essentially being tech vs nature across a multiverse of time and space. It’s never explained how the war started or what will bring about its end however it doesn’t matter because this is a story about Red and Blue with their specific exploits.

There are so many smart writing aspects I love about This is How You Lose The Time War-I love that it’s an epistolary novella, how both writers don’t devote much if any time to lore dumping about how the universe works, that the sense of longing developed feels as if these are real letters you’re eagerly awaiting arrival of. I am also relieved that the writers trust us readers enough to look up words we might not know or (or hexadecimal colour codes) rather than spoon feeding us meaning. So much fun and clever wordplay is incorporated into the scenes before the letters, and within the letters it feels like a treat. Imagine if a writer didn’t have to worry about if someone was going to read something against the grain, and they could lean into narrative indulgence.

Even with this said, there are some parts of This is How You Lose The Time War that are straight up nasty or gnarly. There is a reasonable (I should define what reasonable means to me) amount of body horror. For science fiction as a general rule I expect some kind of weird body horror-either someone being eaten alive by bug like aliens or being killed in some kind of weird horrific way or just like straight up cannibalism-and This is How You Lose The Time War does have it’s fair share for a small book. Blue and Red’s bodies are never clearly defined so as they are inevitably injured in their time war shenanigans, it can be a bit bewildering in trying to imagine how they look. They both take major beatings at different parts in the novella, and at one point one dies. However, within the entirety of This is How You Lose The Time War, we come to understand that time is really just a suggestion and can be massaged into unanticipated exhilarating ends.

My favourite parts of this novella were the parts that felt like water cooler chatter-everyone hates Atlantis, begrudging respect for an opponent’s surprising competence and that bosses everywhere kinda suck. There is one particularly gory part involving a seal (that I swear I’ve had this experience before) where the meaning of a turn of phrase was hilariously (and horrifically) misunderstood. Likewise I adored how much This is How You Lose The Time War leans into being a character study that doesn’t feel pandering or stereotypical: both Red and Blue have quirks, rough edges, and can be tooth rotting sweet at times. I enjoyed the complexity in why Red joined the Time War: an almost crushing or overwhelming loneliness which makes a reappearance late in the novella. I also enjoyed how much of a tactician Blue is throughout the novella (for being the ‘organic’ or nature based, Blue was considerably more cutthroat than Red at some points).

This is my first pick for Gay Wrath month. This is How You Lose The Time War is an indulgent, exuberant romp through all of space and time. Have you read this novella?-What parts did you like (did you also laugh at the part where Cesar’s assassination is the tech faction’s equivalent of going to a bar), and what parts didn’t you care for? Or did this novella inspire you to maybe start letter writing ?