This Is How You Lose the Time War

Letters Across the Timelines

Red is a soldier of the Agency — a technological future that has optimised humanity into something posthuman. Blue is a soldier of the Garden — an organic future that has grown humanity back into something wilder and older. They are on opposite sides of a time war that neither side is winning, traversing history and its possibilities, shaping strands of the past to create futures that serve their respective factions.

And one of them starts leaving letters.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is the novella that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone wrote together — Red is El-Mohtar’s character, Blue is Gladstone’s, and the two writers swapped characters periodically, which is why trying to attribute specific passages to specific authors is essentially futile and missing the point. The collaboration is so complete that the book reads as the work of a single voice that has managed to speak simultaneously from two perspectives.

The Form

The novel is structured as an exchange of letters embedded in the narrative of the time war. We see Red and Blue travelling through history, fighting their respective wars, winning and losing their respective battles — and intercut with these action sequences are the letters they leave for each other: hidden in the rings of trees, carried in the entrails of fish, embedded in the death rattles of soldiers, written in smoke and seed and the curvature of a petal.

The letters begin as provocation — enemies discovering each other’s intelligence, testing capabilities. They become something else. The transformation is so gradual and so carefully managed that the reader, like Red and Blue themselves, does not quite notice when the register has changed from professional admiration to something with far higher stakes.

The epistolary form is used with perfect intelligence. Letters in fiction are typically exposition vehicles or character revelation tools. Here, the letters are the relationship — the medium in which Red and Blue come to know and eventually love each other is the page, the written word, the act of composition as an act of trust and disclosure. This meta-textual dimension, in which the form of the novel is the form of the love story, is the book’s most elegant achievement.

The Prose

Both El-Mohtar and Gladstone are accomplished prose stylists, and This Is How You Lose the Time War represents both of them at their lyrical peak. The writing is not merely beautiful in the decorative sense — it is beautiful in the sense of doing its semantic work through the quality of its language rather than through description alone. Images carry emotional weight. Sentence rhythms enact the moods they describe. The letters in particular — composed by characters who are defined in part by their relationship to language — are among the finest prose sequences in recent speculative fiction.

This is a commitment that not every reader will follow. The lyricism is not optional — it is the mode in which the novel operates, and readers who prefer spare prose or who become impatient with metaphor will find the experience taxing. But for readers who love language as much as they love story, this is the novel that demonstrates what genre fiction can do when it brings its most serious literary ambitions to bear on its most speculative premises.

The Time War

El-Mohtar and Gladstone do not explain their time war in the conventional world-building sense. The structure of the conflict, the rules of the opposing futures, the mechanics of strand manipulation — these are disclosed through the texture of the narrative rather than through exposition. This approach requires both authors to discipline their world-building impulses severely, and they succeed: by the end, the time war is fully legible without having been explained.

The result is a science fiction world that feels lived in from the first page rather than explained from outside — the experience of arriving in a place that has its own logic and finding yourself accommodating to it rather than being guided through it.

What the Story Is About

The time war and its politics are the occasion for This Is How You Lose the Time War, not its subject. The subject is the specific impossibility and irreversibility of choosing someone — of letting them matter more than the cause you serve, the future you are fighting for, the identity that the conflict has given you.

Red and Blue cannot choose each other without betraying everything they are. The choice, when it comes, does not resolve the impossibility — it transforms it into something that has no name in the language of either the Agency or the Garden. The ending is not a resolution in the plot sense; it is a resolution in the musical sense — a return to the tonic after a journey through foreign keys.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A novella that belongs in both the SF canon and the love letter tradition. Essential.