“It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You’re different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”
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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a shorter, sapphic sci-fi story about two time-traveling enemies: Red and Blue. Both are agents in a war dedicated to controling and rewriting time in an effort to destroy the other.
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.
Reading this book was a journey that quickly became one of my favorites of all time. The letters between Red and Blue are the heart of This Is How You Lose the Time War, beginning as teasing correspondence between two rivals, but their animosity transforms into appreciation, and slips into an epic love. Their secrecy becomes their greatest source of safety despite knowing that either one of them could easily destroy the other because of it.
And in the lines of prose that fills these pages, there’s a lingering dread of knowing that their taboo connection will always be threatened by the world and timestrands they rewrite.
This is where I stop trying to describe this deliciously complex universe. There is somehow simultaneously a ton of detail about this strange, futuristic world, and yet it all still feels just a bit too nebulous. Time strands blur, the descriptions of the world reflect the differing stances of the Agency and the Garden, and sometimes it almost feels like a kaleidoscope of points mixed and meshed in flowery prose.
Alone it would have become word salad, but Red and Blue’s time-traveling romance is the glue that holds everything together so beautifully. No matter how many times I read This Is How You Lose the Time War (currently 4 times), it never fails to squeeze my heart and shred me to bits. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. Dive into this book now!
“At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.”