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Cynthia Farrell

Amal El-Mohtar

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar (Author), Max Gladstone (Author) Format: Paperback

(19,942)

Editors' pick Best Science Fiction & Fantasy

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Hugo AwardWinner, 2020
Locus AwardWinner, 2020
Nebula AwardWinner, 2019

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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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Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

S&S/Saga Press
Publication date

March 17, 2020
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.6 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

1534430997
ISBN-13

978-1534430990

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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.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ S&S/Saga Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 17, 2020
Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 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: #4,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Epistolary Fiction (Books)
- #9 in Time Travel Fiction
- #20 in Science Fiction Romance (Books)
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Cynthia Farrell
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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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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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Customer reviews

19,942 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find this book thrilling with stunning prose and a compelling, interesting time traveling plot. They describe it as a beautiful love story that tugs at the heart in multiple directions, and one customer notes it's told in alternating chapters. While some find it an accessible read, others mention it can be confusing to understand.

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287 customers mention content, 239 positive, 48 negative

Customers find the book enjoyable and thrilling, with one describing it as an outstanding novella.

A wonderful, weaving story of love and war....Read more

...Overall, a great read.Read more

Great bookRead more

...It is a delightful story - intriguing, stimulating and thoughtful....Read more

170 customers mention writing style, 138 positive, 32 negative

Customers praise the writing style of the book, describing it as stunning, beautifully heartfelt, and verging on poetry, particularly in the letters section.

...By a WIDE margin. It was so beautifully written and I was truly lost for a good chunk of it, but in the end, everything was made clear and gorgeous.Read more

...Beautiful prose and wild imaginations make this a delightful experience that creates whole new realities you wish you could explore further.Read more

Incredible book! This is poetry, couched in the guise of a time travel science fiction love story. If that makes sense! An absolutely unique read....Read more

...But this is also a solid story with beautiful writing!Read more

144 customers mention story, 109 positive, 35 negative

Customers find the book's story compelling and creative, particularly appreciating its time travel elements. One customer notes that the narrative is told in alternating chapters, while another describes it as a cool twist on the epistolary novel format.

And it was this beautiful story. Like other reviewers, I struggled at first with the cadence. But soon I was lost in this unlikely duo....Read more

Poetic and innovative. Beautiful prose, fun word play, interesting premise. Fairly abstract. Makes ya think. You should read this book.Read more

...The premise is amazing, but the prose is overwrought, pretentious word salad....Read more

...So, what's wrong? There's not much plot, and we never really understand why the two sides are fighting - let alone why they're opposing each other....Read more

96 customers mention romance, 91 positive, 5 negative

Customers enjoy the romance in the book, describing it as beautiful and cell-sizzlingly romantic, particularly appreciating the love story between characters from opposing sides.

...It’s sci-fi. It’s poetry. It’s philosophy. It’s a love story....Read more

...It's got a little bit of everything, sci-fi, romance, alternating timelines, subterfuge, and while it never goes too deep into any one area...Read more

...Full of deft writing, terrible puns, love, heartbreak, and hope, This is How You Lose the Time War is a beautiful novella, unlike anything I've ever...Read more

...Gladstone and El-Mohtar were able to weave together in their beautiful love story. 💙...Read more

85 customers mention aesthetics, 79 positive, 6 negative

Customers find the book visually appealing, with one describing it as lyrically beautiful and another noting how it captures the beauty of love writ large.

...This book is a MUST. It is beautiful, poignant, and aching. It is war, and it is love, and it is everything. Go read it....Read more

...I loved everything about it, from the gorgeous, poetic writing, to the beautiful transcendent relationship, to the interesting, atmospheric peeks we...Read more

...A certain type of reader WILL enjoy the lovely, poetic prose, all emotion and very little plot. But it was definitely not for me....Read more

This is just a beautiful book. A few sentences in the book will force you to "google" words...Read more

66 customers mention pacing, 47 positive, 19 negative

Customers enjoy the book's pacing, describing it as a fast and engaging read, with one customer noting its excellent slow build.

...Was a quick read though, so I didn’t feel like time was wasted. The book MIGHT have benefited from being longer but it’s hard to say.Read more

...It is a quick, accessible read. Seek it.Read more

...My only issue with it was the pacing. It's a very slow read....Read more

This is a fast and unique read....Read more

64 customers mention emotional, 60 positive, 4 negative

Customers find the book emotionally engaging, describing it as heartrending, passionate, and often heartbreaking, with one customer noting how it tugs at emotions in a thousand different directions.

...the short length, I thought the romance was quite heartfelt and touching....Read more

...blending and bending, referencing everything in between, bizarre and heartfelt. You become surprisingly invested in a very short time.Read more

This was amazing. Imaginative, fascinating, heartbreaking, and too good to put down. They should write together more often....Read more

...elements established more concretely, but it's fast, fun, exciting, emotional, and altogether a very good read.Read more

63 customers mention readability, 21 positive, 42 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's readability, with some finding it an accessible and beautiful read, while others describe it as a fevered dream that is little confusing to understand and hard to follow.

Moving and profound but also Confusing and clunky at times. Definitely a book you need to read twice. Im glad I stuck with it, it was beautifulRead more

...Read it in one sitting and think about it every day.Read more

...As it is, it’s mind-numbingly dull, difficult to follow, and the writing style endeavors to be so romantic with its endless metaphors that it makes...Read more

This book is so hard to read. I am confused.Read more

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