What can I say when Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone join forces and publish a four-hand written book? They are both well recognized as some of the best writers of the new generation of fantasy and science fiction and This is how you lose the time war helps everyone to understand why.

Amal does not have a wide production so far. However, she has already won the three major awards – Hugo, Nebula and Locus, thanks to Seasons of Glass and Iron, published on 2016 as part of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales anthology. Her relation with the genre goes far from that as she also reviews science fiction and fantasy books for the New York Times Book Review weekly magazine. Max is very well known thanks to The Craft Sequence series, which has seen six books published for now in addition to many short fiction published in various anthologies.

This is how you lose the time war has a really powerful plot which attracted my attention since the first time I read it. The book tells us the story of Blue and Red. Both are special agents in charge of changing some bits in the history of humanity. The objective is to make each of her organisations the dominant in the world. We will follow their journeys along the history amending these bits. To do so they will sometimes need to spend a whole period of time in a specific period while some other actions will only take a few instants to be completed.

They will travel back and forward at the same time they start writing letters one to each other. In some of these words they will explain the actions they are completing. Some others will be more focused on the relationship with their respective responsible. However, their superior will began to suspect that something is going on and will take actions to confirm their suspicions.

The novel is basically the letters they send one to each other. These messages, written in any surface of format depending on the period of time they are based, evolves since the some basic content at the beginning to a much more intimate wording when the relation progresses. It is also very interesting to see how they manage to hide or keep their messages so the other agent can find it. And how sometimes they really struggle to find them!

The book is written in a very poetic language. Therefore this is a novel to read bit by bit, word by word, tasting every sentence and trying not to jump over any of them. A second read where you will realise the amount of detail including in the book is also helpful to understand the whole plot. I can confirm I will go back to This is how you lose the time war at some point not far on the future. I have really enjoyed it every time I had the chance to sit for a half an hour time reading. A slow burning read for people searching for something different.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone have shown with This is how you lose the time war such great things they can write both together. If you are looking for a fast paced tale, this might not be a book for you, to be honest. This is a novel highly recommended for people who like joining pieces along the reading not having a clear path since the beginning. Readers who prefer an emotional and slow paced book rather than action from the very first sentence. If such, This is how you lose the time war is a no longer than two hundred pages book which well deserves every second you dedicate to it.

This is equal parts beautiful and mind bending. For a novella, it manages to capture the feelings of love, admiration, war, hatred and desire all wrapped up into letters told between Red and Blue. Two agents, designed to hate and destroy each other, yet grow to respect and love instead.

It’s purposely vague in its presentation of the characters. We’re never really sure of the factions Red and Blue work for, and descriptions are few and far between. All that becomes apparent is that both sides are cruel and manipulative, not bothered about the lives of their enemies, and Red is more technologically minded and Blue is more environmentally based. But what’s built instead is this wonderful, organic relationship that feels natural and imaginative. Told mostly in letter between the two, each must become more creative in the way they send the letters to avoid detection by their warring sides - whether that be a flammable note on a battlefield or running through poison. At all times you can feel the passion and fire between the pair as their love grows, and it was lovely to see it unfold so beautifully and in such an unforced way. I’ve read many a novel, many times the length of this one, where the fundamental love interests just don’t have this kind of chemistry. It just shows that the quality of the words are often better than the length.

I admit, sometimes I did struggle with the writing style for this - especially in the beginning as it is quite flowery at times. However, as the story progresses and titbits of information are leaked from the pages, I came to find that the words matched the personalities of Red and Blue well and it flowed well. The short length also keeps this from getting bogged down in too many descriptions and world building. It simply doesn’t need it, and keeps the focus firmly on Red and Blue.

Widely unique science fiction novella that resonates with passion and fire.

It begins at the end of a battle. Our two main characters are the top agents for rival sides in the war.

Red - she is from a future with enhanced technology. She works for The Agency.
Blue - she is from a future that is more environmental. She can shapshift too which was a nice touch to add in. She works for The Garden. 

They leave messages to each other that begins with a taunt and ends with them falling in love. I would say this book is more of a love story than a sci-fi story but there are sci-fi elements involved in the story. 

I really enjoyed the romance as it wasn’t rushed and it was written really well.
What I Liked?
The Romance - this is the type of romance I enjoy as it is written really well. The romance in this is f/f which I also liked as we need more diverse romances. It is also a slow moving romance as it is mainly through letters and they slowly get to know each other. 
I loved the letters, the way they write letters is unique, they can be written in tea leaves or lava. I thought this idea was great and it adds to the sci-fi elements in the book.
 I enjoyed the sci-fi elements, there is time travel and there are different strands of time that are weaved liked braids. Some things happen in a different timeline and some strands of time they sabotage so that the future they know can happen.
 The writing is poetic and lovely. It was such a nice thing to read and although not my normal style I did enjoy it. I will admit it might not be for some people. 
I would have liked to no more about the futures and I wanted to know more about The Agency and The Garden. 
Slightly confusing - it has some science language in it and there's also poetry. The time travel can also be hard to wrap your head around. 
Overall I greatly enjoyed this book, I may not have understood everything and I know that it won't be for everyone but I would recommend to give it a try if you think it is your thing. 

This review will be posted on my blog as part of the blog tour.

[ note, review will go live on my blog at the provided link tomorrow ]

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a short novel about two time-travelling agents who start corresponding with each other. It's written in a poetic style and is half-epistolary, half-prose.

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

And 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, grows into something more.

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

This is a remarkable book, told in a very poetic style, with chapters alternating between snippets of our characters’ lives and the letters they send each other. Although it is written as prose, one feels as though one is reading poetry. The use of imagery and metaphor is strong and frequent and the relationship between the characters shifts as they become more obsessed with each other as they learn more about the other.

At first I had difficulty keeping the characters straight in my mind — Red and Blue, from futures Garden and Agency, wait, which was which again? — but then it became clearer as they obtained more identifying characteristics. There was [the one that had happened to] and [the one that did this thing], to keep it spoiler-free. I started reading this book while travelling and I don’t recommend reading it in a noisy environment. It was easier to enjoy at home, calmly. Or at least with noise-cancelling headphones on. It is the kind of book that demands your full attention to properly take in its words and worlds.

I don't generally like spending too much time comparing books to other things, but it feels particularly topical in this case. This Is How You Lose the Time War is a book that pushes many if the same buttons as Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman or Killing Eve but with a more poetic writing style than Good Omens and more emphasis on the relationship between enemy agents than Killing Eve. (I speak of the TV show Killing Eve, here — the books it’s based on look dreadful.) Also, in the struggle for a better future, no one side is clearly better than the other, which is not how most oppositional relationships are portrayed. In Killing Eve, Villanelle is the assassin so MI6 agent Eve clearly has the moral high ground. And things are both more and less ambiguous in Good Omens, where the two sides are literally heaven and hell. But if you liked either of those stories for their protagonist relationships, this is the book for you. Especially if you wished there was more time travel in them.

Actually, before I wrap up, I will say a few words on the time travel aspect. It's both integral to the story and sort of minimally done. No mechanics are explained, which makes sense for the style of the book, and all the time travel feats are basically magic, as far as we mere time-bound mortals are concerned. Sometimes that sort of thing bothers me, but in this case it fits in perfectly with the style of the book. The time travel is absolutely not the point, the letters between Blue and Red are, and doing it any other way would have been bizarre. For all that I've said the prose is very poetic, it's also very sparse (in the way of poetry, now that I think about it). For this reason, it took me a little while at the start of the book to feel grounded in the story (or as grounded as one can be in such a story) but, again, it makes perfect sense for what it is.

I really liked this book. I highly recommend it to fans of doomed and/or oppositional romance (is that the right term?), poetic letters and magical time travel. It's a quick read but a powerful one. If you're not sure whether the style is right for you, I think it's something you could quickly determine by reading the sample chapters on your favourite ebook store. In any case, I highly recommend This Is How You Lose the Time War.

5 / 5 stars

First published: July 2019, Jo Fletcher Books
Series: No, I don't think so
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

Glorious and heartbreaking.

Told in unusual correspondence this story is an epic war time romance and impossible to put down.

I absorbed the words and emotions more than read each individual word. Landscapes are created, timelines altered in the blink of an eye and what existed no longer does, or did, or will. What acted a certain way now is entirely different. Changes are wrought where only the time warriors involved will remember them… or will they?

Not only is it fraught communication between sides, where trust may be fleeting or forever, but when each side realizes they are compromised… how do you survive let alone save each other?

This is a complex story, mindbending and detailed. A unique concept brilliantly put down onto the page – and yet I am still thinking, what of the words were real…? Have they changed? Would I know? A terrific story.

Get it when it comes out.

A pretty and challenging read.

Red and Blue are agents from opposite sides of an ongoing time war. Red is from The Agency, fighting for a technological, machine age future. Blue is from Garden, working towards an almost fae environmental Eden future.

As they zigzag upstream and downstream through the threads of the future and past, making changes to try and turn the tide of the future in their side’s favour, they encounter each other and identify kindred spirits. They begin to communicate through covert letters, hidden in their respective battlefields, and their relationship with one another develops, cutting across times and locations, until their understanding of the war and their respective factions begins to shift.

This is an ambitious novella. The premise is compelling – two opposing time agents? Communicating through letters! And the story commits to making the most of those elements. The locations Blue and Red meet are diverse and interesting – Mongol empire? Far future tech apocalypse? Neanderthals? Yes to all of these. I can’t go too much into the plot without spoilers, but it’s a lovely trajectory and just the right length for a novella.

The methods they use to leave letters to each other are also fascinating and unique. The epistolary approach is great, allowing Red and Blue to tell each other and the reader about themselves, their experience of the war, and their feelings for each other without it feeling clumsy and much more effectively than trying to ‘show’ that through interactions would have.

I would have loved more detail about the setting, but I get that that wasn’t the focus of the book and what we did get of the wider world was fascinating.

I had mixed feelings about the prose, though. I loved in and hated it from paragraph to paragraph – I highlighted so much of this book because I kept running into lovely turns of phrase! – but I think I mostly didn’t like it. I found it beautiful and poetic, but it’s so dense as a result that I found it tough to read. The action sequences, particularly the climax, being told in senses and metaphors made it ambiguous as to what was happening. I think I got the gist of it, which is the best I can say. I know clearly how it felt, but not how it happened. This is absolutely a subjective thing and I’ve noticed a lot of readers are loving the prose style of this, but it struck the wrong balance for my tastes.

This isn’t a popcorn book or a light summer read – it requires more focus and is pushing for something more than that – but, if you’re looking for a short, art-y book about time travel and love that you’ll want to talk to someone about, this is a great option.

An advance copy of this book was kindly provided by Quercus Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

An interesting novella. Imaginative, well-written, and quite engaging.
The epistolary structure works very well, and the authors do a great job of giving each character - "Red" and "Blue" - distinct voices.
If you're a fan of science fiction, then I think you'll find a lot to like here.
Recommended.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is an incredible, intricately composed story of two rival agents, Red and Blue, going forwards and backwards millennia in time repeatedly trying to undo and outmanoeuvre each other’s attempts to win an endless war. The book is a masterclass in quality over quantity; without exaggeration it can be said that every line is important and beautifully written. Elegant to the point of poetry, sentences often end up being read multiple times. The reader can easily find themselves just enjoying each intricately alluring sentence before realising they’ve ignored the plot for paragraphs at a time. At only 200 pages, the time to read easily equals that of a traditional 400-page novel when the reader is almost forced to slow down and savour each word.

As is reflective of the characters’ personalities themselves, there is no hand holding here in any aspect of the storytelling. The epistolary structure is set up through increasingly intricate means that do not need to be understood to be enjoyed. The lore is vaguely teased out when one agent finds it necessary to preclude a taunt with some context. And the time travel system is not forgotten but rather scoffed at. There are mentions here and there of how time is braided together, reminiscent of Red and Blue, two lines of a helix pattern that never meet, but the mechanics are unimportant, not even given the formality of a brief explanation.

Ultimately, the book is truly a unique experience in and of itself. Incapable of being described in the format of ‘x meets y’, it is wholly and truly its own thing. It is bizarre and different and unclear and exceedingly original. This Is How You Lose the Time War may not be for everyone, but it is objectively something individual and undeniably breathtaking.

After being seriously hyped up for this ARC after seeing the Goodreads page and seeing this cover everywhere, I was a bit flabbergasted when I finally started it because this couldn't have been further from what I imagined this was going to be.
This is an enemies to lovers story with two non-humans, robotic beings that are on opposite sides of a Time War. Being the top operatives on their field, they start trading letters to brag about their superiority.
What made me dislike this book, in the beginning, was language, made up and archaic terms used in turns forcing you to check the meaning of half the words and try to figure out what the other half means from the context or resigning to ignorance. That and the fact that we have a very shallow understanding of the world in which the characters inhabit with only half of the book being written in normal chapters usually spent describing whatever time zone and place Red or Blue are instead of giving us the backstory to why that mission is necessary. So we know that they are trying to influence the timeline in favor of their side but not why or to what end. It is only as the story progresses and they start to like one another that we start to learn about each one of them in their letters.
It might have taken me a while, and I might have not liked them separately (Red even less than Blue) but I loved them as a couple and I preferred the people they became to the people they were before they knew one another.
Half of this book is told in letters and the way that they are written was one of my favourite things because that is where all the love story and character development happens because Red and Blue meet only once. It reminded me of gay and lesbian relationships through time, the letters filled with poetry and forbidden desire, always afraid they would be found out. As their relationship evolved so did the way they talked to each other and this book was worth it just for the way they addressed each other at the beginning of each letter and the p.s.'s at the end. It is through that relationship that they start to change indulge in small pleasures instead of being the perfect soldier devoid of any wants or defiance they used to be. Love made them "human".
This is also an extremely diverse book with one of them at least having dark skin and the people they visited being all over and even outside this planet. Favorite detail though: black Atlanteans!!!! I'm so looking forward to fanart of this and would love to see an animation or even movie of this story.
Although this is a short book I found myself having to make a few pauses once in a while to be able to unpack all the information and scream at all the plot twists.
This is a story that will defy your sense of reality, with some many maneuvers and counter-maneuvers that you will not know what to believe but Red and Blue will be there through it all and seeing them fall in love was amazing.
Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for this ARC.

There are two sides of this time war: Red's side is The Agency, steeped in technology; Blue's side is The Garden, where her people are grown.

The Agency and the Garden's agents work down various strands of time, up and down, trying to undo each other's work so that a particular timeline's outcome works better in their favour. A religious icon is killed here, a mathematician on the brink of a discovery is saved here, Atlantis falls over and over again. And Red and Blue are present at all of these events. They become aware of each other - they have always known about the other side's agents of course, but these two are at the top of their game.

They start leaving messages for each other - letters! - dangerous messages that their superiors would have them killed for. What starts out as admiration turns into love, and their race through time intensifies even more.

It's a strange book (novella I believe, I read the e-version so I don't always notice these things, but it's definitely on the shorter side) - I'd recommend reading a sample of it if you can, because the prose is extremely lyrical and you'll either get on with it, or you won't.

I did, but I must admit at times I felt my understanding of the story was not where it should've been. I'm sure some of it went whoooosh over my head.

In essence, this book focuses on the messages, the communications between Red and Blue. It is NOT about, specifically, how the Agency and the Garden work, how travelling through the different strands of time works - it is unlikely (if you are at my brain level!) to fully understand the complex world they live in. But you do learn to understand how much they care for each other - and I think / hope that's the takeaway the authors intended.

It feels fresh and different, and that's worth something too, isn't it?

This is How You Lose the Time War was a very unusual read. It has sci-fi, romance, literary fiction with a beautiful, lyrical writing. It was a short and powerful book. I enjoyed the 2 characters, the romance developed. it was very original and interesting,
I definitely recommend it, and I wish it was a bit longer.

Thanks a lot Netgalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

[this review will be up on my blog on July 15th, 2019]

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novella about a love that transcends time, space and humanity. It's beautiful and lyrical and heartbreaking; it's all of these things and I loved its ending so much that I don't feel like I can do this story justice with a review. Just know that, while this is an epistolary f/f enemies-to-lovers story set during a time-travel war, calling it that feels almost reductive.

It follows two entities, "Red" and "Blue", both presenting as women but who don't strictly adhere to our definition of what a human is, and there's a time war. If you're the kind of person who needs to know the reasons and the workings of everything, this won't work for you; it's often vague, but as I didn't feel like much more context was needed, I didn't have a problem with that.

The writing in here will be polarizing. At times, I hated it: it was pretentious, and it made me feel like the authors were trying to show off how many pretty sentences they were able to string together without saying that much at all. But in other places it was beautiful and powerful, and the foreshadowing was woven into this story effortlessly - which only makes sense in something about braiding time.
And you know what else makes sense? That a story about Red and Blue writing to each other would be 90% Purple prose.

In one of my updates, I said that I wondered whether this started out as a short story. If you've ever read some short fiction on online magazines, you probably recognize the metaphor-heavy style and the vagueness of the worldbuilding, and I mean, if I'm going to read something that short, I want something really pretty that will make me feel and won't need that much background to do so. I wouldn't have minded if the authors had toned all of this here a bit down, however.

This is How You Lose the Time War was a fascinating read and something very different--certainly different from what I was expecting. It was an incredibly beautiful and poetic piece, and I particularly loved the letters the two characters exchanged. Once or twice I wished there could have been a little more world building and background information, as the story did rather throw one in with little explanation or context, but the relationship and romance shone through, which helped negate any missing backstory. This is probably not going to be for everyone, but if you fancy your sci-fi with a literary fiction/poetic bent, I recommend giving it a try.

My review will go live on 1 July.

From the moment Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone announced they were co-writing a novella, it immediately became one of my most anticipated SFF releases. I was dying to get this book, blurb unseen – because with these two authors, there was no doubt it would be amazing. And weird.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a love story – the star-crossed kind. Two enemy agents start an unlikely correspondance in the midst of a war through time. The messages are sent through improbable ways, each time a surprise for both the reader and the recipient. The tone is taunting, boasting at first, then it becomes flirty, then achingly beautiful.

It’s a study of contrasts: the horrors of an unending war, the beauty of a blossoming and fragile love. The playfulness of a new relationship, the tension of the outside world where they’re supposed to be mortal enemies. The fear, the wonder, the hope.

The setting is strange. Granted, saying “the setting is strange” when Gladstone and El-Mohtar are involved is very much like saying “water is wet”. There a mix of futuristic elements and a form of dark, fairytale-like magic which makes the reading experience unsettling. But at the same time, we’re grounded with familiar elements to pop culture and classical references. I got Blue by Eiffel 65 stuck in my head for days (thanks Amal, thanks Max…).

Both authors play to their strengths, which gives us this miracle of a book. Poetically nerdy, poignantly romantic. Surprising at every turn. I’ve never read anything like it, and I strongly suspect I never will again.

A woman approaches you. She's wearing a dark coat. She reaches into an inside pocket and holds something out. "Hey you," she says, "look at this." You're not entirely sure what you're looking at; but it's beautiful. Multi-faceted like a diamond. Intricate like one of those sculptures where the artist makes stone look like lace. You try to get a closer look, but she whisks it away and holds out her other hand. This one holds something as alien as the first thing, just as beautiful, just as intricate, but wholly different. Even as she tells you to look at it she's pulling it away, but there's something new back in her first hand....

This is what reading This Is How You Lose The Time War feels like. An onslaught of sharp and beautiful things, one after the other, no context and no mercy. Neither of the heroes, if heroes is even what you could call them, strike me as the kind of women prone to hand-holding, so I guess this makes sense. 'Keep up or drown and I really don't care which,' is a sentiment I could see coming from either one of them. It's certainly how they feel about each other. At first anyway.

Every second line of this novella is the kind of startling perfection most other books would hinge their entire selves around. The worldbuilding, or at least the worldbuilding shown to the reader is flashes and reflections, is rich and raises endless questions. It's not hard to picture a multi-volume sci-fi epic set in this world(s), but at the same time I didn't find myself unsatisfied with the briefness of this story. And the inherent briefness of a novella is nine times out of ten my main issue with the format, so that's high praise from me. It was similar to Kai Ashante Wilson's two breathtaking books that way; the prose is rich enough and just challenging enough that each lines carries the weight of two, or three.

If you were to strip this prose back to the barest language I suppose you would find a plot that lands on the scant side. Easy to spoil, with beats that aren't impossible to predict. You might notice that a good third of this novella is just two (human? delightfully unclear) woman confessing their feelings for each other in different ways while nothing else really happens. Although I think even in this scenario you'd have be impressed by how time travel is handled here, how all the usual paradox's aren't ignored so much as not even dignified with a response.

But anyway, these complaints that might ruin another book mean little here, because you're not stripping the prose away. It'll be there to paint scenes so soft you could almost sink into them, to carve moments so sharp you might look up from your reading to check you're not actually losing blood. When you finish a book like this you know you've read something special. Even if you didn't love it, even if you flat-out hated it, it's something wholly unlike anything else. And wholly different things are rare gifts in this world.

I was immediately drawn to this book -- particularly because of the phenomenal title, the gorgeous book cover, and the fact that I love time travel plots. I’ve never read anything by either of these authors so I was naturally curious about this book, and I’m so glad I gave it a try. This is How you Lose the TIme War is a lyrical, poetic, bizarre, and gorgeous tale of star-crossed lovers from opposing factions in, well, a time war.

This is How You Lose the Time War has such a unique structure that suits the novella length so well. Often I find that I’d prefer novellas to be full-length books, but this isn’t the case here. The clever structure is made up of disjointed scenes that flash through time that are both violent and peaceful, horrifying and comforting. Much like the relationship between Red and Blue, the landscape is ever changing and shifting. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t necessarily follow every moment of the book, but I still really enjoyed the journey. I think sitting back and appreciating the gorgeous writing is the best way to consume this book, rather than trying to follow a linear narrative because that’s just not what it is.

The book is also interspersed with the letters Red and Blue write to each other -- you see the progression of their relationship through these letters.The correspondence forms the heart of the story, allowing us to get to know these two people, their backgrounds, and their motivations. The push and pull between them, the banter, and the evolution from taunting and banter to something deeper is just wonderful -- their correspondence was my favourite part of the book.

I don’t think this book will be for everyone, but This is How You Lose the Time War is a strange and lovely tale of star-crossed lovers crossing paths across the different strands of history. If you’re looking for something unique or lyrical, you should definitely pick up this book.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a love story across the battlegrounds of time, sci-fi turned into an epistolary romance. Red, an agent of the Commandant, finds a letter bearing the instruction 'Burn before reading'. It is from Blue, an agent from the rival side, and it sparks off a correspondence, taunting to begin with, then growing into something more, something romantic and world-defying. Soon—or not, as this is the Time War—their bond is deep and discovery would be the end of them, and the question remains, who will win the war?

Written as a collaboration between two writers and featuring two protagonists known by colours and pronouns (both 'she'), this is not your usual sci-fi story. Though there are teased out descriptions of the circumstances of each side, it is really focused on love and time and the myths and quirks of the multiverse. Packed with referenced despite its short length, it is a book that rewards its readers for spotting references and witty names as its protagonists do the same with each other. The creation of an aching love story told in improbably letters is an impressive feat, and the lyrical prose suits it well, particularly as the protagonists devolve into poetry and metaphor to try and explain their love across time through written words.

This is not your typical sci-fi, and those who aren't fans of the genre should give the book a chance, though its unusual style and worldbuilding won't be for everyone. It is forbidden love, Romeo and Juliet style, but with the complications of cause and effect and a war that seems insurmountable. It is playful and clever, almost unbearably short, and it is the pull of and between the two protagonists that brings it together.

A writer I mostly love collaborates with one I barely know, but about whom I've heard very good things. Their theme: that old tale of love across the barricades. Except that this time it's Juliet and Juliet, and it's not just this time, it's up and down the timelines as two agents plot and counterplot to precede and encompass and outmatch each other. Red and Blue, science and nature, Agency and Garden hatch empires and dam volcanoes and tweak things just so to ensure their own futures come to pass, and along the way the ingeniously coded messages pass back and forth, shifting gradually from taunting to curiosity to friendship to something more. It's an epic conflict conveyed strictly in kaleidoscopic background glimpses, a pattern of fragments much like its own hidden communiques. What started as surprises and jabs become eagerly sought, even longed for – "I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex." And the messages always had to be a secret, because loyalties are jealously watched by the high command, but at some point they really do start to become more important than the mission. There's more than a little Killing Eve to it, except where that could be told in glances and changed postures, on the page this needs the older chassis of an epistolary romance, even as it's shattered into something far less formally straightforward. Utterly gorgeous.

(Of course, any mention of a Time War is going to capture the attention of a certain subset of geekdom. Is it the same Time War as seen in various forms in Doctor Who and its spin-offs? As far as I'm concerned, of course it is, even before that reference to all the Atlantises that keep sinking. Because all Time Wars are, even if the writers were entirely unaware of it; Who is the overstory within which all other stories take place, whether or not they know it, back as far as stories go: you think it's coincidence that the first original novel of Who's 1988-95 Golden Age wrapped itself around the first story we have and brought in Gilgamesh? Not that you need to buy my reading, or have the least interest in Who, to enjoy this book. Which is for the best)

(Netgalley ARC)

A charming, short, albeit occasionally slightly over-lush queer genre romance, mostly in an epistolary format, what This Is How You Lose The Time War lacks in depth - it feels slightly hurried and emotionally superficial, and it's ironically hard to differentiate the voices of its leads despite the collaborative authorship - it more than makes up for in style.

Esperaba con gran expectación la llegada de This is How You Lose the Time War, principalmente por la coautoría de Max Gladstone, un escritor que me encanta, pero también por la temática de viajes en el tiempo, uno de los grandes temas clásicos de la ciencia ficción

Al contrario de lo que imaginaba, no se trata de una obra exclusivamente epistolar, porque aunque las cartas que se envían las dos agentes temporales de bandos enfrentados sustentan la novela corta, también hay variedad de pasajes descriptivos que no utilizan este formato.
Lo que si destacaría es la belleza de la prosa utilizada, capaz de hacer que te entretengas en captar los distintos matices y referencias imbuidos en las frases. Este mismo juego de referencias puede llegar a cansar a algún lector que busque una aproximación más directa. Creo que en esto se nota la influencia de Amal El-Mohtar pero Gladstone no se le queda atrás.
La intrincada forma en que las agentes se van dejando mensajes en las distintas líneas temporales que modifican según los planes de cada una de sus facciones es una fuente constante de sorpresa y regocijo para el lector, en una vuelta de tuerca constante cada vez más hiperbólica.
Sin embargo, la información que acabamos recibiendo de un futuro o de otro, o de la propia guerra que libran las agentes Rojo y Azul, es muy escasa. Es señal de gran maestría por parte de los autores ser capaces de desvelar tan poca información pero que aún así nos veamos arrastrados por el flujo de la narración, rebuscando pequeños detalles para hacernos una composición de lugar que por la propia naturaleza de la historia no va a quedar completa.
Es esta una historia romántica unida de forma inseparable a la ciencia ficción de sus viajes en el tiempo. Es una apuesta arriesgada para los autores, pero creo que merece la pena dedicar nuestra atención a esta pequeña joya.