@ Lyn Alden
2025-06-15 14:35:01
Imagine, if you will, a story about two empires so vast and powerful that they have control over nanites, genes, planetary-busting bombs, and the very ability to time travel itself, while locked in a timeless war with each other.
And now imagine a story of that insane scope is written as a short novella.
Anyway, here's a mostly spoiler-free review of "This Is How You Lose the Time War" which I just finished reading. It's a multi-award-winning short book, and very commercially popular, yet only has a 3.86 out of 5 review on Goodreads because it is polarizing.
Back-cover type of summary: A time-traveling agent named Red works for the post-singularity technotopia called the Agency, and another time-traveling agent Blue works for a vast organic consciousness called the Garden. The two agents are post-human, with powers almost beyond comprehension. They engage in a time-traveling battle of wits over centuries, but eventually Blue leaves Red a letter that says "Burn before reading" which Red reads, and thus begins a chain of letters that they write to each other while warring. After so long and complex of a war, they each find their opponent more fascinating than anything else.
I do like the premise a lot. For those that have played Magic the Gathering, it's like if one side casts a fireball, and the other side casts a counterspell, but then the first side casts a counterspell on that counterspell, and the other side counters that counter that countered their fireball. Two empires so vast and powerful that they're battling across a multiverse of timelines, constantly undoing what the other has done. One side kills a key figure of history. The other side kills the would-be assassin of that figure. The first side goes back further and attacks somewhere else, and so on. Determining the outcomes of wars, rewriting history, dancing across multiple different "threads" of time, while trying to keep Chaos from spiraling out of control.
As a random example, in some time-threads Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy that we know it. In other threads, Romeo and Juliet was written as a comedy, with a light-hearted outcome. Who knows what tiny differences in Shakespeare's life would have led him to write one or the other.
Since the book was polarizing, my assumption going in was that I would not like it. This is basically a story about a time war written by poets, and thus my engineer brain is likely to kind of check out.
And indeed, I actively did not like the first half. I found myself reading out self-enforced obligation to get through it, sometimes skimming over whole paragraphs. The prose is pretentious, though arguably on purpose because the two agents are effectively demigods, playing six-dimensional chess with each other while also being absolute murder-machines when needed, so there is a sort of eloquent battle of wits that they engage in with their letters.
Additionally, despite Red and Blue being so different, and literally written by different people (the book was co-authored), I surprisingly found them to be too similar to each other. Although again I suppose that's kind of the point. Two sides involved in a war so complex and long, how could you not turn out similarly to each other? That's not really a spoiler; from the start there's an obvious "we looked at the enemy and saw that it was like us" vibe.
Lastly, given the shortness of the book, obviously the reader is not really going to know the details of this world. It's inherently hard to empathize with characters that you barely understand even from a physical standpoint, given how absurdly advanced and post-human they are. And since there are multiple timelines that these agents go through, reading most of it made it unclear how death works, or what the consequences of death are in this multiverse. The obvious point from the start is that in this grand war, we would be focused on just two characters, and yet not knowing certain rules of the overly-complex world can potentially affect how well we can attach to those characters.
But then... the second half did get me more engaged and curious. I had to see the punchline, had to see how it would end, and indeed I cared for the outcome of the characters. So, they got me.
I'd give the book an 8/10. There's a creative and experimental aspect to it, nontraditional high-brow literature sort of stuff. Too poetic for my taste; not concrete enough. But I wouldn't necessarily change anything, either. It's very interesting, despite not quite being for me.
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