Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know about the time war, but this is how you win a bunch of awards, or it ought to be.

Red and Blue are time agents, on opposite sides of a war to manipulate events towards their respective futures. That's not an original premise, but what these two authors do with it is.

I'm not familiar with much of Amar El-Mohtar's work, but I've read enough Max Gladstone to know that for me, he can be hit and miss. "A Kiss, With Teeth" is one of the best stories I've ever read; parts of his Craft Sequence, the series with the lawyer/sorcerers, are excellent, but parts, for me, were deeply disappointing (not least because the other parts were so good). I also knew he didn't shy away from the dark and gruesome, so I went into this book with trepidation.

There is dark, and there is gruesome; there is a lot of death, and the cotagonists are usually its instigators, which doesn't help me to identify with them. But the only slight disappointment in terms of writing craft, for me, was perhaps an inevitable one: even though these agents range across multiple timelines and planets in the course of the book, all of the references they use are to our particular timeline (just as, in Gladstone's Craft Sequence, he occasionally drops an undigested piece of this world into his very different setting, and it jars me).

Apart from that, it's frankly amazing. I stopped about halfway through and went and read some other things, mainly because I was afraid it had got as good as it was going to, and the last half was going to just fall apart. But no. It got better.

Red and Blue begin as enemies, but they become first rivals, then friends, of a sort, and then.... it just keeps getting more intense. They write to each other secretly, using their considerable powers and ingenuity to encode messages in everyday objects that fall into the other's hands. If either of their factions finds out, they're both dead. But their lives are inextricably entangled, and perhaps nobody else in all of time and space can understand them except each other.

The prose is beautiful, and well edited; it's powerfully poetic, full of heavily weighted imagery. The plot is complex (as time travel plots tend to be) and compelling. The characters themselves - I wouldn't want to meet them; I wouldn't want to be them; but their intensity and passion drew me in regardless.

This is, in short, a very fine book that richly deserves the many accolades that will be heaped upon it. It's something quite unusual in the realm of speculative fiction, something that very few authors could pull off anything like this well. As a reviewer, I read a lot of mediocre or by-the-numbers books; this is not, by any stretch, one of them. It's excellent.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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