This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This was on my Amazon wishlist for a while, and then I read this blog post by one of the authors and decided to order it. Basically, this book from 2019 suddenly shot to #21 on the Amazon sales rankings due to a viral tweet by a guy named Bigolas Dickolas. He said something like, “Don’t look this book up or read anything about it. Just buy it and read it.”

Ordinarily, I would not take such advice from internet randos, but that kind of recommendation does resonate with me. I like to choose books or movies based on only a strong recommendation that I trust, not knowing what they will be like. Could I trust Bigolas Dickolas? Not sure, but since it was already on my Amazon wish list and was on sale for less than $9, I went for it.

I would say the authors accomplished what they were going for, but it just wasn’t for me. A bunch of victorian love letters between time traveling robot shape-shifters with essentially magical powers… sounds cooler than it is.

Spoilers follow.

Red and Blue fight for opposite sides in some kind of war spanning time and various universes. Red fights for “the Agency” (kind of tech-centric), Blue for “Garden” (she was literally grown in a pod or something). They can shape-shift (one of them is a six-legged wolf at one point) but are usually human females.

They are constantly going to various timelines and interfering, killing off humanity to destroy a timeline, etc. They leave notes for each other, so every chapter is a short scene followed by a note. But the notes are rarely written with ink on paper, and the way this is described annoyed me. A message is hidden in magnetic signals read by an MRI machine. In the sound bones make when falling into a pit. In the feeling of certain very specific splinters. I mean, this is creative, but who are these people? They are like gods.

The letters get increasingly like love letters. Never sexual, thankfully, but there’s a lot of yearning.

Godlike or not, one (Blue) will die from eating some berries poisoned by Red. Of course, a message is hidden in the flavor of the berries. With a super secret message hidden inside that message somehow. It says, “Don’t eat these, they’re poisonous! The Agency is making me do this because they found out about you!”

The twist goes like this:

Red poisons Blue, and Blue dies. Then Red runs off, and begins reexamining all Blue’s letters, and she finds secrets hidden in them that allow her to become like Blue in some way. She is able to sneak into Garden at a point in time when Blue is a child. She finds Blue, growing in her pod, kisses her, Blue bites her and tastes her blood, and Blue is infected by the poison that would later kill her.

Blue has revealed that she was sick as a child, “as a result of enemy action.” We learn that the enemy was Red. But the poison she received as a child wasn’t to kill her – it was to innoculate her. So current-day Blue, having been poisoned, didn’t actually die. And she and Red can excuse themselves from the Time War to live near each other and drink tea together or something nice.

The flowery language, the whimsical ways they communicate… it all felt a little like reading a teenage girl’s diary, with lots of purple passages about her feelings.