This is How You Lose the Time War
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.” So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space. Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they’re the best, and they’re alone. Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it? A tour de force collaboration from two powerhouse writers that spans the whole of time and space.
Stats for nerds
16recommend
27mentions
20people
2019–2025years
85% recommend11% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- On A Red Station Drifting - Aliette de Bodard: a wild mixture of a station, run by a failing AI and strict Vietnamese behavioural rules.
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel, plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven
Nine Fox Gambit: Yoon Ha Lee: disgraced officer of space fleet must capture fortress protected by complex mathematics.
Theatre of the Gods and Hunters and Collectors by Matt Suddain. Both defy a one line plot description, look them up. Theatre was one of the best books I have ever read.
This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Two opposing generals mess with time to gain a personal meeting.
Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill: the story of a scavenger robot
- Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it to denigrate Gibson - his writing is beautiful, and I think he's one of the most perceptive Sci-fi writers going. The Blue Ant trilogy was one of the best encapsulations of the "new" world at the turn of the millenium, and reading The Peripheral has the terrifying quality of being given a prophecy of a future you don't want.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
- I liked reading "this is how you lose the time war" recently if you want something that is essentially sci-fi themed poetry. If you haven't already read it, maybe that'll be a fun break.
- If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks.
From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.
- “This is How You Lose the Time War” is brilliant. Highly recommend the audio book.
- > "This Is How You Lose the Time War"
No other book captured the feelings of being 20-something and flirting like reading this. Reading it felt like being right back there again, with all the excitement and anxiety. Highly recommended to anyone.
Unsure how it connects to the notion of a brain filling in the blanks. I thought it was quite "filled in", but maybe my brain did it, and therefore I'm making your point for you :)
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