Book Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War

 

•  Authors: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

• Where I bought this book: after words, Chicago

• Why I bought this book: It has birds on the cover

***

  A short novel that nevertheless feels neverending.

    Perhaps that's an inherent problem when you set your story in everlasting time and every place. It goes on and on, and nothing really matters, because characters can go back and change everything.

     It's the quantum form of the Butterfly Effect.

        

    That said, I could find several reasons to like this book. It has an interesting concept: Two sentient beings who can travel through time and space as they represent different factions become pen-pals -- or whatever the quantum equivalent is.

    And it's well written. Some of the writing is poetic, soaring with metaphors and philosophy. Literary concepts come hard and fast -- at times, the characters are literally writing onto the tea leaves, and drinking the tea means reading it while consuming the thoughts on those leaves.

    Yet, the authors get carried away, leaving the notion that if anything is possible, reality cannot exist.

    A striking, disturbing theme carries the novel: that war, competition among life forms, is the point of it all. Winning, and being on the winning side, is the reason for existence.

    That's how the novel begins, with the two authors competing to see which side thrives in the end. Either Red, who comes from Agency, a "post-singularity technotopia" (???) or Blue, from Garden, "a consciousness embedded in all organic matter." 

    Yet, as the pair continues their correspondence, they show signs they know they are merely pawns in the game. Blue expresses this thought:

Let me tell you a secret: I loathe Atlantis. Every last single Atlantis across all strands. It's a putrid thread. Everything you've likely been taught about Garden and my Shift should lead you to believe we treasure it as a bastion of good works, the original Platonic ideal for how a civilisation ought to be: How many bright-eyed adolescents have poured the fervour of their souls into lives imagined there? ... The work we do to maintain these notions is more subtle than you might think, given the publishing peccadilloes of a dozen twentieth centuries. 

    Indeed, cultural and literary figures abound across all times and dimensions. Historical figures pop in and out, but because of the omnipresence, the novel is ultimately ahistorical. 

    Red and Blue's letters go from hate and distrust to love and desire before doubling back. It's a frustrating novel. It wants to cover all the passions of a relationship. It wants time to double back and repeat, so anything and everything can happen in the worlds.