This Is How You Lose the Time War

Audiobook

4 stars (11 reviews)

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 …

5 editions

Either too short, or too long.

No rating

I can't decide if this would have worked better (for me) as a short story, or a full length book. If it was longer, it could have expanded on it's ideas. If it had been shorter, it wouldn't have felt so repetetive.

There is some good ideas here, but they deserve better than being hand waved away. How do Red and Blue target their letters to each other across strands of time? If there are certain contested junctures in time, shouldn't they be swarmed with agents, and multiple aspects of the same agents? If the protagonists are just cogs in two massive opposing machines battling for supremacy over all time - why does it seems like they are the only two operators in the field?

I'm not saying this is a bad book, there is a lot good writing here. But it didn't work for me. Two highly subjective stars. …

I know a ton of people loved this but…

2 stars

I found it pretty frustrating going. I like the idea that they're hiding secret letters for each other as they fight the "time war" but the war itself was so abstract and ridiculously coated in poetic license that I often was just annoyed at how the authors were trying to push forward on a rush of emotion instead of backing things up with a little stronger consensual reality. Maybe I rushed it? I dunno. Not my up of tea on the end at any rate.

Subjects

  • science fiction
  • time-traveling
  • epistolary
  • LGBT
  • English literature
  • Fiction, science fiction, general