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This Is How You Lose the Time War Paperback – March 17, 2020

by Amal El-Mohtar (Author), Max Gladstone (Author)

4.3 14,493 ratings

Editors' pick Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

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* HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA *

“[An] exquisitely crafted tale...Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay...This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

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Popular Highlights in this book

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But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.
Highlighted by 3,855 Kindle readers
Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.
Highlighted by 1,677 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

* “[An] exquisitely crafted tale…. Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay… This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities.” ― Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

"If Iain M. Banks and Gerard Manley Hopkins had ever been able to collaborate on a science fiction project, well, it wouldn’t be half as much fun as this novella. There is all the pleasure of a long series, and all the details of a much larger world, presented in miniature here.” -- Kelly Link

"This book has it all: treachery and love, lyricism and gritty action, existential crisis and space-opera scope, not to mention time traveling superagents. Gladstone's and El-Mohtar's debut collaboration is a fireworks display from two very talented storytellers." -- Madeline Miller, Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction

“Seditious and seductive, lush and lustrous, allusive and elusive, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR is one of those rare stories where one struggles to decide whether to heap more praise upon its clever structure and prose or its brilliant ideas and characters. Never mind ... sit back and let it wind its way into your mind, until, with a start, you realize that you no longer know where the story ends and you start.” -- Ken Liu author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Lyrical and vivid and bittersweet. An absolutely lovely read from two talented writers.” -- Ann Leckie, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Ancillary Justice

“An intimate and lyrical tour of time, myth and history, with a captivating conversation between characters—and authors. Read it.” -- New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi

"This Is How You Lose the Time War is rich and strange, a romantic tour through all of time and the multiverse, and you shouldn’t miss a moment.” -- Martha Wells, Hugo Award-winning author of The Murderbot Diaries

“A time travel adventure that has as much humanity, grace, and love as it has temporal shenanigans, rewriting history, and temporal agents fighting to the death. Two days from now, you've already devoured it.” -- Ryan North, New York Times Bestselling and Eisner Award winning author of How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time Traveler

“Poetry, disguised as genre fiction. I read several sections out loud — this is prose that wants to be more than read. It wants to be heard and tasted.” -- Kelly Sue DeConnick, author of Captain Marvel

"A twisting, sapphic time travel fantasy love story that never stops surprising: El-Mohtar and Gladstone have written the ultimate in enemies-to-lovers romance.” ― Booklist, Starred Review

“Seditious and seductive, lush and lustrous, allusive and elusive, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR is one of those rare stories where one struggles to decide whether to heap more praise upon its clever structure and prose or its brilliant ideas and characters.”
—Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Tenderness, danger, daring, wit — Time War has them all... In other words, these pages are strewn with myriad delights. -- Nisi Shawl

About the Author

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author, editor, and critic. Her short story “Seasons of Glass and Iron” won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and was a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Aurora, and Eugie Foster awards. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and The New York Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared on Tor.com and Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. She is presently pursuing a PhD at Carleton University and teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. She can be found online at @Tithenai.

Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, which Patrick Rothfuss called “stupefyingly good.” The sixth book, Ruin of Angels, was released this September. Max’s interactive mobile game Choice of the Deathless was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. John Crowley described Max as “a true star of twenty first century fantasy.” Max has sung in Carnegie Hall and was once thrown from a horse in Mongolia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
When Red wins, she stands alone.

Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world.

That was fun, she thinks, but the thought sours in the framing. It was clean, at least. Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agency’s arranged—the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible. She’s come to knot this strand of history and sear it until it melts.

She holds a corpse that was once a man, her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She lets go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronze to depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red.

After a mission comes a grand and final silence. Her weapons and armor fold into her like roses at dusk. Once flaps of pseudoskin settle and heal and the programmable matter of her clothing knits back together, Red looks, again, something like a woman.

She paces the battlefield, seeking, making sure.

She has won, yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasn’t she?

Both armies lie dead. Two great empires broke themselves here, each a reef to the other’s hull. That is what she came to do. From their ashes others will rise, more suited to her Agency’s ends. And yet.

There was another on the field—no groundling like the time-moored corpses mounded by her path, but a real player. Someone from the other side.

Few of Red’s fellow operatives would have sensed that opposing presence. Red knows only because Red is patient, solitary, careful. She studied for this engagement. She modeled it backward and forward in her mind. When ships were not where they were supposed to be, when escape pods that should have been fired did not, when certain fusillades came thirty seconds past their cue, she noticed.

Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

But why? Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.

Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does, for Red. Her fellow agents do not feel the same, or they hide it better.

It is not like Garden’s players to meet Red on the same field at the same time. Shadows and sure things are more their style. But there is one who would. Red knows her, though they have never met. Each player has their signature. She recognizes patterns of audacity and risk.

Red may be mistaken. She rarely is.

Her enemy would relish such a magic trick: twisting to her own ends all Red’s grand work of murder. But it’s not enough to suspect. Red must find proof.

So she wanders the charnel field of victory and seeks the seeds of her defeat.

A tremor passes through the soil—do not call it earth. The planet dies. Crickets chirp. Crickets survive, for now, among the crashed ships and broken bodies on this crumbling plain. Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.

It won’t, and neither will they.

On a span of blasted ground, she finds the letter.

It does not belong. Here there should be bodies mounded between the wrecks of ships that once sailed the stars. Here there should be the death and dirt and blood of a successful op. There should be moons disintegrating overhead, ships aflame in orbit.

There should not be a sheet of cream-colored paper, clean save a single line in a long, trailing hand: Burn before reading.

Red likes to feel. It is a fetish. Now she feels fear. And eagerness.

She was right.

She searches shadows for her hunter, her prey. She hears infrasonic, ultrasound. She thirsts for contact, for a new, more worthy battle, but she is alone with the corpses and the splinters and the letter her enemy left.

It is a trap, of course.

Vines curl through eye sockets, twine past shattered portholes. Rust flakes fall like snow. Metal creaks, stressed, and shatters.

It is a trap. Poison would be crude, but she smells none. Perhaps a noovirus in the message—to subvert her thoughts, to seed a trigger, or merely to taint Red with suspicion in her Commandant’s eyes. Perhaps if she reads this letter, she will be recorded, exposed, blackmailed for use as a double agent. The enemy is insidious. Even if this is but the opening gambit of a longer game, by reading it Red risks Commandant’s wrath if she is discovered, risks seeming a traitor be she never so loyal.

The smart and cautious play would be to leave. But the letter is a gauntlet thrown, and Red has to know.

She finds a lighter in a dead soldier’s pocket. Flames catch in the depths of her eyes. Sparks rise, ashes fall, and letters form on the paper, in that same long, trailing hand.

Red’s mouth twists: a sneer, a mask, a hunter’s grin.

The letter burns her fingers as the signature takes shape. She lets its cinders fall.

Red leaves then, mission failed and accomplished at once, and climbs downthread toward home, to the braided future her Agency shapes and guards. No trace of her remains save cinders, ruins, and millions dead.

The planet waits for its end. Vines live, yes, and crickets, though no one’s left to see them but the skulls.

Rain clouds threaten. Lightning blooms, and the battlefield goes monochrome. Thunder rolls. There will be rain tonight, to slick the glass that was the ground, if the planet lasts so long.

The letter’s cinders die.

The shadow of a broken gunship twists. Empty, it fills.

A seeker emerges from that shadow, bearing other shadows with her.

Wordless, the seeker regards the aftermath. She does not weep, that anyone can see. She paces through the wrecks, over the bodies, professional: She works a winding spiral, ensuring with long-practiced arts that no one has followed her through the silent paths she walked to reach this place.

The ground shakes and shatters.

She reaches what was once a letter. Kneeling, she stirs the ashes. A spark flies up, and she catches it in her hand.

She removes a thin white slab from a pouch at her side and slips it under the ashes, spreads them thin against the white. Removes her glove, and slits her finger. Rainbow blood wells and falls and splatters into gray.

She works her blood into the ash to make a dough, kneads that dough, rolls it flat. All around, decay proceeds. The battleships become mounds of moss. Great guns break.

She applies jeweled lights and odd sounds. She wrinkles time.

The world cracks through the middle.

The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire ink in a viny hand at the top.

This letter was meant to be read once, then destroyed.

In the moments before the world comes apart, she reads it again.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ S&S/Saga Press; Reprint edition (March 17, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1534430997
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1534430990
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Space Fleet Science Fiction
- #18 in Time Travel Fiction
- #224 in Romantic Fantasy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 14,493 ratings

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Max Gladstone
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MAX GLADSTONE is a fencer, a fiddler, and Hugo Award Finalist. He has taught English in China, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Max lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston. He is the author of the Craft Sequence (Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, Last First Snow, Four Roads Cross, and Ruin of Angels).
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Amal El-Mohtar
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Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic: her short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, while her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She is the author of THE HONEY MONTH, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and writes the OTHERWORLDLY column for the New York Times Book Review. She's the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, an epistolary time-travelling spy vs spy novella. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.
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Sarah Hackbarth

Unexpectedly sweet sci-fi/fantasy sapphic romance

Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

“I wanted to be seen. That need dug into the heart of me.”
❤️
This book left me speechless. I’m still not sure how to compose a true review, because my review will be worlds below the skill and beauty that Gladstone and El-Mohtar were able to weave together in their beautiful love story.
💙
Red and Blue stole my heart and carved a piece of themselves into my soul. This book comes in at just under 200 pages (198 to be exact), but the impact on me was no less than that of an epic fantasy.
❤️
It is wordy, perhaps even pretentious, but it fit the characters so well, and the English major (and lover) in me appreciated the hell out of this text. It’s a story of time travel, and divisive ideals, and friendship, and humor, and most of all, love…how love really might be worth losing everything else for.
💙
Some words I might use to describe this story: captivating, poetic, sapphic, fantastical, bittersweet, romantic, imaginative, and heart-wrenching.
❤️💙
“And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self…is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to posses, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away.”
❤️
“Always a balancing act, of course, to give without losing, to support without weakening. Everything a weaving.”
💙
“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”
❤️💙

9 people found this helpful

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Nick Wisseman (author)

Letters = Time Travel

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2021

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Letters are many things in Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War. Taunts between foes. Invitations to friendship. Missives of love.

They are also, at various points, tree rings, magma, and bubbles. (Seal guts are involved at one point too.)

This epistolary novella begins as a contest between two time travelers, the preeminent members of competing organizations bent on shaping the multiverse to fit their respective visions. Red works for the Agency, a technologically advanced version of humanity that’s implanted her with weapons and armor and pseudo-skin that can change form as required. Blue works for Garden, an organic hivemind whose members have evolved natural corollaries to these tools of destruction and deception. When deployed against each other, Red and Blue are “equal and opposite reaction[s],” as Blue terms them at one point, “a microcosm … of the war as a whole.”

Their struggle is the next thing to endless. Both are essentially immortal, capable of playing the longest of long games in one “strand” (i.e., potential timeline) after another. They might live out an entire life advising a variation of Genghis Khan, for example, and then skip to a resulting future to alter the outcome of a space battle, before circling back to a connecting past to ensure that the wind in an underground labyrinth “whistles over the right fluted bones,” so that “one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with child in a storm, and so it goes.” Sometimes these actions seem noble, like immunizing Native Americans centuries before contact with Europeans. But in other missions Red and Blue massacre millions.

And it wears. Early in the time war, it was probably easy for these adversaries to shrug off the psychic toll levied by their work—why bother with morality when there are multitudes, when London has so many incarnations they’re labeled with numbers and letters? Yet after eons of plotting and maneuvering and killing, the war goes on, and Red and Blue have little to show for their service.

Except their rivalry.

One-upping each other becomes a new challenge. Not just in the field—although they do plenty of showing off there too (subtle and otherwise). But after Blue rubs in a victory by sending Red a letter that can only be read by burning it, Red responds with a message that can only be read by boiling. From there, they concoct increasingly elaborate ways to continue their correspondence. In the process, their relationship changes, morphing from competition to curiosity to … something more.

It’s a fascinating tale.

The prose borders on poetry—mostly to the good, although I occasionally had trouble following the action. And I’m not sure all the time travel mechanics add up. (If Red and Blue can pinpoint their communications to the exact time and place the other will receive them, how have their parent organizations not figured out when and where to assassinate each other’s agents?) But I loved the ways El-Mohtar and Gladstone play with the concept of letters. “There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?” muses Red at one point—words you can reread to take you back to a specific moment, no matter how long it’s been since you first read them.

The paper can vary. Same with the ink. But the transportive quality of letters endures. I only wish we wrote more of them in our current “strand.”

32 people found this helpful

Helpful

Sarah

Fantastical sci-fi book with a compelling romance to top it off

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2023

Verified Purchase

I actually bought this book a few months ago on the recommendation of a reading list, but I never got around to seriously digging into the book. But after getting through another few stories, and after reading about a certain Twitter user whose endorsement went viral, I was intrigued. So I picked it up and almost immediately, I was enthralled.

I will say, for a relatively short 200 page novella, this book is remarkably dense and intense. It is a back-and-forth between two warriors of warring factions in a time war. The time war itself is both rather obvious in nature (they travel to different times and places and influence events) and incredibly dense, with interweaving timelines that form and melt based on the actions of the protagonists. I would say that if you are looking for a book that deep dives into finer details of the worldbuilding and time travel system, this isn't the kind of book for you.

Instead, the worldbuilding serves as a fascinating tapestry upon which the narrative unfolds. The authors, in my opinion, leave wide room for interpretation, and I found that to be so refreshing for a sci-fi book. I suppose that was a necessity, based on the length of the novella, but it was an excellent one, because it allows so much of the story to revolve around the romance between the characters.

And the romance! I can't overstate how great it feels. It's playful, it's teasing, it's as rich as a triple chocolate cookie, and it's thrilling. It felt so lively, I could have seriously guessed that the authors were dating each other (which was not the case, as the afterword mentions, both are married to other people). And the fact that it was a Sapphic romance was perhaps the most delightful part. I'm so used to Sapphic romance being rather plain, or falling into several tropes, but the setting really forced the authors to expand beyond those tropes. And what a delight that was! I would not only recommend this book to lovers of LGBT romances, but to anyone who loves a great romantic tale. It's too good to pass up!

7 people found this helpful

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Slave Liam

Fun romp with a twist

Reviewed in Canada on August 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

It's fairly short, it's fun, it's well-written, there's quotes and literary references for those who notice (but it's also OK not to notice) there's time travel, there's torture with pliers (mentioned, not seen), and i want to read more by these writers.

Liéria

Beautiful

Reviewed in Brazil on June 14, 2023

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Loved it.

Layla

life changing

Reviewed in Germany on April 25, 2024

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the romance i have witnessed in this book is like no other i have ever seen in my life, in media, or in my wildest dreams. Reading this was the best thing ever and I can only recommend

Rosa Arangüena

Un libro precioso

Reviewed in Spain on March 16, 2024

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La edición es muy bonita y la novela es original, me ha gustado mucho.

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Gordonette Freeman

I gotta say

Reviewed in France on September 4, 2023

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Bigolas Dickolas was right.

Don't read anything about the book, just dive in it.

These words are needed to post my very useful review, so here they are.

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