This Is How You Lose the Time War

Title: This Is How You Lose the Time War

Authors: Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

Publisher: Saga Press

I’ve pined and pined for a new science fiction and fantasy prose stylist, a writer like William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut or Iain Banks, someone whose books are not filled with dry, dead ideas, but instead with words in all their vivid, chaotic glory.

Well, I’ve found two, and what a hollow victory it is.

“This Is How You Lose the Time War” is a slim novelette, a hair under 200 pages in my edition, and that’s even when they’ve done the sophomore thing and fiddled with the margins. It is a celebration of words, the language of love, an epistolary tale told in messages exchanged between “Red” and “Blue,” two agents on opposite sides of the “Time War” of the title.

I love it and hate it.

Love it that here is a novel that cares what words mean and how they sound and feel when lined up next to one another. Much of the modern SF&F genre seems taken up either with sterile “thought experiments” where the only thing that matters is the magic system, or else grimdark adventures that are an exercise in shoehorning as many expletives and disembowelments as possible into the least amount of text.

Instead, there’s a wonderful inventiveness to the scenes and descriptions, a sense of playfulness with words, puns, rhymes and near-rhymes. Whatever else I’ll say about the book, some of these bits are just plain fun to read.

There's also a kind of giddy inventiveness to the ways the two agents come up with to leave each other their secret missives--encoded in the growth-rings of ancient trees or engraved in the long-buried bones of pilgrims, for example. 

Last but not least it avoids the trap other overexcited stylists often fall into—I’m thinking of Yoon Ha Lee mainly, to be honest, though I’ll have to delete this if I ever get an agent—of regurgitating their Book of Obscure Terminology all over the page and calling it art. It is flowery without being baroque, descriptive without being a chore. 

I’m also happy to see that this is one of those rare books the literary awards and I can agree on. It won a BFSA Award and a Nebula Award just recently. No, I won’t link to the page. We’re in a backwater of an eddy of a distributary of that great river of data that is the world wide web, nobody cares about my sources. Just take my word for it.

So, what’s the problem?

Well, having escaped the clunk, it’s gone too far in the other direction, if you take my meaning.

Hate is perhaps too strong a word, but I can’t help but be disappointed how hollow the whole exercise is. The two protagonists spill lyrical rivers of ink describing their surroundings, their mission, their admiration for one another, but it’s not really in the service of anything other than the authorial-patting-self-on-the-back of “Hey, aren’t these words great?”

The two sides in this battle, the technological Agency and the Gaia-esque Garden, are hinted at, but what they’re trying to achieve and how is left rather vague so it’s not clear what the stakes are—indeed, there are none for about the first chunk of the book, until the two agents commit the transgression of falling in love with one another.

Give your audience somebody to root for, experts say, and sorry but I don’t. Red is introduced to us as a mass-murderer. I could care less if these two soulless automata manipulating entire civilizations for their own benefit find love or not. These aren’t relatable people. I wonder if making them both ostensibly women (though it’s clear they can change shape and gender at will) is supposed to make them more sympathetic. Sorry though, a romance between killers isn’t any more palatable just because they are, in some abstract way, lesbians. 

I don't entirely buy the love story at the center of the tale, either. It might be the nature of a romance told in letters, but both characters seem far more in love with themselves and their own cleverness than one another. It takes a certain kind of narcissism to believe that others should be intimately interested in your every thought and feeling, much like dedicated diarists, for example, there has to be some unshakable belief that your experience is uniquely worth sharing. (He said, on a blog, yes I know) 

The format imposes a kind of monotonous repetition as well. Red describes a scene. Discovers that they have been thwarted by Blue—but lo! Blue has left a message. Red reads the message. Next chapter, the roles of writer and reader are reversed. Next chapter, same deal, reversed. Next chapter.

You see? A bit mind-numbing.

And it reinforces the fact that all the beautiful text is mere window-dressing, a lead into the actual heart of the story, the letters being exchanged. None of the places or people being described in these vignettes matter, either to the two main characters or to the narrative, so really, why bother, you won’t miss anything if you skip ahead.

Finally, some of it is just a bit smug and lazy. There’s a crack about Ontario being awful. Really? Screw you, too. This is how you lost an otherwise sympathetic reader.

Much as it pains me to admit, great prose in the service of nothing but its own greatness is not a satisfying read, and in the end the book just comes across as entertaining but a bit self-indulgent, two writers deciding their letters to one another are terribly clever and should be worth $20 for anyone else to read.