This Is How You Lose the Time War in Den of Geek Book Club

Jul 18, 2019 Tammy rated it liked it

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.The nitty-gritty: Decadent writing and lush imagery make this a feast for the senses, but as a story it didn't quite work for me, I'm sad to say.

I’m afraid this book and I got off on the wrong foot. Otherwise how do you explain the fact that every review I’ve seen has been a gushing, five star review? This is How You Lose the Time War is exqui I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.The nitty-gritty: Decadent writing and lush imagery make this a feast for the senses, but as a story it didn't quite work for me, I'm sad to say.

I’m afraid this book and I got off on the wrong foot. Otherwise how do you explain the fact that every review I’ve seen has been a gushing, five star review? This is How You Lose the Time War is exquisitely written, a poetic masterpiece created by two highly talented and seasoned writers. On one hand, I loved the interplay between not only the characters on the page, but the voices of Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar as they seamlessly weave together the story of Blue and Red. But honestly folks, this book was such a struggle for me to get into and I almost didn’t finish it. What should have easily been read in a day or two stretched into a week or more, because I kept putting it down to read something else. Simply put, you might need to be in the right frame of mind to read this.

But what I did learn, the more I got into the story, is that this novella isn’t about plot so much as emotions and atmosphere. The plot, in fact, is very basic, and I can tell it to you without giving anything away.

Red and Blue are two agents fighting on opposite sides of a time war. Red works for the Agency and Blue works for Garden, and throughout the years, bloody battles are fought with wins and losses on both sides. After one battle, Red finds a note that says “burn before reading,” a taunting challenge from Blue that Red gleefully accepts. And so the two begin a correspondence of the oddest kind, unique letters sent back and forth over the years and distance of the war, disguised so they won’t be detected. Because it turns out someone is shadowing their every move and knows about the forbidden letters. After all, two agents on opposite sides shouldn’t be writing letters to each other, should they?

The letters, which start out mocking, soon become confessional, emotion-filled notes, as Red and Blue begin to respect and eventually, fall in love with each other. But can their doomed relationship last? The Agency and Garden will not tolerate disobedience, let alone deception.

This novella is a treat for readers who love language, who want to roll it around on their tongues and savor the various meanings hidden in the sentences. If you love poetry, this can almost be read as one long poem, although that’s not the format it’s written in. As a work of art, it succeeds brilliantly. Without a doubt, This is How You Lose the Time War will be up for numerous genre awards next year, just wait and see.

But does it succeed as a piece of fiction, that is the question I’ve been asking myself. And I still haven’t decided. Clearly it has for lots of other readers, but I found it difficult to peel away the many layers of beautiful writing, clever sentences and stunning imagery to find the story underneath. I kept looking for hidden meanings but never found them. For example, what is the significance of "the Agency" and "Garden?" Were they meant to be metaphors for something I just couldn't grasp? Other reviewers have said things like "just go with it" and "don't worry about the plot," but I find that very hard to do. And the length was either too long or too short. I almost think it might have worked better as a short story, that a tighter, leaner narrative without all the dramatic and violent posturing of its main characters would force the writers to get to the point faster.

My favorite point in the story was the moment when a terrible decision must be made by one of the characters. It was a brilliant idea and beautifully written. It is at this point that the story becomes a love story. And I actually loved the ending. It was weird and complex and fit with the idea of two people moving up and down the strands of time.

But did I fall in love with it like so many other readers? I have to admit it was a unique reading experience, but unfortunately it won’t end up on my “best of the year” list in December. I envy all those readers who did fall in love with this story, but I’m just not feeling the emotions I was hoping to feel at the end. Ultimately, this is a book you’ll have to read for yourself and form your own opinion, and chances are, you’ll enjoy it more than I did.

Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy.This review originally appeared on Books, Bones & Buffy ...more

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Jan 20, 2021 Craig Childs rated it really liked it

Two rival warriors on opposing sides of a conflict that is waging through both time and the multiverse gradually develop a friendship, then eventually a romance, via a series of letters to each other. Red is an android (or maybe a heavily tech-augmented descendent of humanity?) who is fighting for the Agency to create/preserve a future where sentient machines rule the cosmos. Blue is fighting for a future in which the consciousness of all life has merged into a hive intelligence called Garden.

T Two rival warriors on opposing sides of a conflict that is waging through both time and the multiverse gradually develop a friendship, then eventually a romance, via a series of letters to each other. Red is an android (or maybe a heavily tech-augmented descendent of humanity?) who is fighting for the Agency to create/preserve a future where sentient machines rule the cosmos. Blue is fighting for a future in which the consciousness of all life has merged into a hive intelligence called Garden.

Their ideal futures are mutually exclusive. A mysterious seeker tracks them with an unknown purpose.

This is an imaginative epistolary novella (only 3,000 words short of a full novel) that won the Hugo and Nebula awards. It's SkyNet vs. the Force!

It imagines time as a spider web created by causal branching. Warriors can travel upthread toward the past, downthread to the future, or jump from one strand (reality) to another. Our reality is Strand 6. Red and Blue battle to change history to create, destroy, tangle, or converge threads to achieve the desired outcome for their respective factions.

One of the themes that becomes obvious early on is that you cannot win a war when each side can exploit an infinite number of causal relationships: "Winning this battle, losing that, strangling that old evil man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse, feels empty because it is: In the war they wage through time, what lasting advantage comes from murdering ghosts, who, with a slight shift of threads, will return to life or live different lives that never bring them to the executioner's blade? Repetitive task, murder. Kill them and kill them again, like weeds, all the little monsters."

This reminds me of science fiction being written during the New Wave movement in the late 1960's/early 1970's. Some of it could have come from the typewriter of Harlan Ellison or Michael Moorcock. The prose alternates between passages that are beautiful and poignant and others that that are obtuse almost to the point of incoherence:

"There are so many Atlantises, always sinking, in so many strands: an island off Greece, a mid-Atlantic continent, an advanced pre-Minoan civilization on Crete, a spaceship floating north of Egypt, and so on. Most strands lack Atlantis altogether, know the place only through dreams and mad poets' madder whispers."

"Adventure works in any strand--it calls for those who care more for living than for their lives."

"We're grown, I think you know--seeds planted, roots combing through time, until Garden repots us in different soil. Our seeding points are so thoroughly embedded that what I mentioned before about approach is inconceivable: Garden goes to seed, blows us away, and we burrow into the braidedness of time and mesh with it… The only way to access us is to enter Garden so far downthread that most of our own agents can't manage it, find the umbilical taproot that links us to Garden, and then navigate it upthread like a salmon in a stream."

Much has been made of the fact both Red and Blue are female characters, making this an LGBTQ+ positive representation. Personally, I found this to be a red herring. For both these characters, gender is a non-consequential variable. Blue can exist in any organic life form--wolves, birds, even the dust floating between stars--and sex is not needed for procreation. As for Red, I could never figure out why an android society would evolve gender roles in the first place. Red can change her appearance at will, including swapping between male and female. Presumably her normal pool of partners (e.g., all the other androids) can do the same. In this hermaphroditic society, I do not understand what functional or evolutionary advantages would be gained by adopting rigid binary gender roles, unless they are simply a carryover from her human ancestors, if she had any. Regardless, almost all the characters from Garden and the Agency are depicted as female.

(As an aside, I may not like it, but I am willing to accept on faith that sentient androids/cyborgs might develop emotions and a sex drive. This has been a trope in science fiction as far back as Asimov's "Bicentennial Man" and Charles Stross' Saturn's Children.)

The final thirty pages of this book are excellent. There are betrayals, surprising revelations, and a closed-loop time paradox that works perfectly. Seemingly random details emerge as the glue that holds the story together. Very few time travel tales manage this feat -- Well done! ...more

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Oct 04, 2019 Joy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sff-books

First off I'll tell you I found this through a blog by Charles de Lint. If you're familiar with his work you will know what sort of story this is like.

I fell in love immediately with this lyrical syfy novella. It had all the elements that once made science fiction my go-too genre. Shades of Bradbury with insight into complexities of human interaction, philosophy and beauty mixed into a fantastically imaginative setting. And it's a love story.

Beautiful word play and imagery play out in these lett ...more

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Jul 16, 2021 Faye rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, scifi-fantasy-magic-realism, dystopia, reread, sapphic, epistolary, action, keep-rereading, fictional-politics, love

Literally every time I read through my highlighted quotes from this book I want to reread the whole thing. One of my favorite books possibly of all time. I just — wow.

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