This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. I occasionally read Science Fiction, but it is not my usual fare, particularly contemporary authors. (I do enjoy Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin and a few other classic writers.) 

 

To start off with, this book is a bit unusual. It is technically SciFi, and speculative fiction, but this is more the context than the content of the book. For plot-related reasons, the context matters - the story could only take place in the context of time travel and the Butterfly Effect. But, at its heart, the book is a love story, and a metaphor of hope that irreconcilable enemies can become friends and create a new future. 

 

The book was co-written by Amal El-Mohtar (who wrote the “Blue” sections) and Max Gladstone (who wrote the “Red” sections.) The authors got together in person and blocked out the plot and outline, so the book holds together with far fewer seams than most co-written books. However, they also wrote the letters between the characters without full knowledge of what would be said, so there remains an element of genuine surprise, and of discovery as the correspondence unfolds. 

 

The basic premise is this: there is a “time war” being fought using time travel between two competing organizations. The Garden is a sort of biological/evolutionary collective consciousness - one might think of it like a mycelium - while The Agency is a more AI/singularity/technology collective consciousness. A battle between two future collective intelligences, so to speak. 

 

But these intelligences also manifest in individuals, including the two main characters, Red and Blue. Red works for The Agency, Blue for The Garden. They are both top-level secret agents tasked with going back in time and taking action to ensure that the future belongs to their respective forms of life. 

 

This might mean murder, or nurture, or something else altogether. Basically, the agents use the Butterfly Effect to alter the future. These futures are intertwined like a vine in what are referred to as “threads,” and have numbers and connections which can be navigated and selected. A small change in one will affect everything down-thread from there. 

 

So far, nothing too surprising. In fact, the authors simply assume the reader understands the universe this is taking place in, and do not take the time to explain. This is fine, as long as the reader has the sort of background to figure out the “rules” without a need for them to be stated. It also allows the book to be relatively short, and to spend very little time setting the stage and explaining the rules of the game before the story itself can begin. 

 

There are some less expected twists, though. Men are not really present as characters in this book. At all. When they appear, they are historical figures which exist in multiple possible futures. So, Shakespeare and Socrates exist in every possible future, but they are different depending on the circumstances. One of the best examples is that Romeo and Juliet will be either a comedy or a tragedy in any given future. But you only know which one when you get there. 

 

Other than that, all of the characters are female. Red and Blue, their superior officers, their fellow agents, and anyone who actually serves as a character rather than an NPC. (Non-player Character for those of you who don’t know the video game lexicon.)

 

This means, naturally, that the love story - it should be no surprise to anyone within the first few pages that this is between Red and Blue - is therefore a queer romance, although not an explicitly sexual one. Metaphorically, though…let’s just say that “becoming one flesh” is definitely involved.  

 

Over the course of the book, Red and Blue go from being rivals in a somewhat Spy Versus Spy sort of way - trading victories on different threads - to gradually becoming friends, and then something more, before each literally sacrifices their lives for the other, in order that they can have a chance at building a future beyond the time wars. It all starts with Blue leaving behind a letter to Red, who returns the favor at the next meeting, and so on throughout the book. 

 

It’s a fun premise, and the writing is good. One might even say poetic - several people in our book club used that word, and it fits. At the beginning, the characters mostly talk smack, but gradually progress to a sort of professional respect, then friendship, and finally a kind of love that really has to be understood as romantic. Along with this, the language changes, becoming more intimate, more tender, more emotionally involved. 

 

I mostly read this on the flight back from New York last week, so I got to experience the book as a whole, rather than in pieces, which I think helps. It really is a unit, a compact novella, an emotional journey. 

 

There were a few lines that I noted. The first one describes pretty well what the Time War itself is about. 

 

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. 

 

I particularly love that the poet is the most dangerous. In the long term, this has often proven to be true, for good and ill. There is another scene, set in one of the many possible Atlantises - like Shakespeare, they exist in every possible future, and end roughly the same way - where the religious leaders stay to the end, dying in their temples. 

 

A priestess and a priest remain with their temple. They will be burned. They have lived their lives as sacrifices to - who again? Red has lost track. She feels bad about that. 

They lived their lives as sacrifices. 

 

This is a question I have asked myself a lot lately. I think most humans understand (and at some level admire) those who live their lives as sacrifices to some noble principle. “Give me liberty or give me death” and all the variations on that theme. Or “greater love has no man than he who lays his life down for his friend.” 

 

But the sacrifice of a life to the service of a deity or religion that is not connected to a universal noble principle? That is a lot harder to countenance. Even less so, the sacrifice of others to one’s religion, something I know all too well from experience. 

 

I didn’t catch it at first read, but going back (which I did throughout the book), this moment is a crucial one in Red’s personal journey, where she first starts truly questioning whether she herself is living her life as a sacrifice to…what again? To “winning”? To destroying “the other”? 

 

There is also a discussion, mostly by Blue, on the problem of forgery. As she notes, “Forging someone’s handwriting was wasted effort if you didn’t also learn their idiosyncratic orthography.” This is true as well of AI writing. I have looked over my kids’ essays for years as part of their schooling process. I can easily tell when they are writing in their own voice rather than copying too closely (as all kids do when they are learning proper essay form) because of their idiosyncratic style. 

 

This also carries over into the book. Because Red and Blue are written by different authors, their idiosyncratic styles are recognizable, particularly in the letters. 

 

As a final thought, I mentioned that I ended up flipping back throughout. The reason for this is that the book is carefully plotted - very much like a good murder mystery. From the first few pages, there are carefully placed clues about what will happen later, but they are not noticeable but very subtle. 

 

For the first 40 pages at least, I was unsure where the book was going, but by the time I got near the end, I could see that everything was delicately set up with clues, events, and language. I very much appreciated this - a book that has such a tapestry that only becomes clear at the end is a treat. 

 

This isn’t the kind of book I would have thought to pick up and read, but I ended up enjoying it, and also very much enjoying the conversation regarding the book at our club. (We really do have great conversations and a variety of perspectives.) 

 

I read a physical copy, but those who listened to the audiobook thought it was good, so that may be another option for those who prefer that.