After giving This is How You Lose the Time War a five star review, I started scrolling through other reviews and I found thoughtful, well reasoned arguments for the other side. This is a thoroughly crafted well written book that is not going to be to everyone’s taste.
The premise is two opposing secret agents, saboteurs, time and history manipulators who work for conflicting civilizations become aware of each other and start to exchange letters. It becomes a love story.
The nature of the work each main character does to manipulate history across many centuries and many parallel universes makes the narrative confusing. I can’t imagine it done effectively any other way, but I also like other confusing time shifting stories where the story starts to make sense later.
The characters only meet through their letters with a couple of exceptions, so some say the love story is unbelievable. For me, it reflects the extreme isolation and loneliness of their work and how even minimal tenuous companionship of a peer would satisfy a gaping need.
The writing includes extravagant romantic feelings and poetic literary allusions to go with the science fiction and time travel aspect. I appreciated it, but people who like romance and poetry don’t always like science fiction and time travel and vice versa.
The authors lean into the epistolary format. It’s not exclusively letters but a significant percentage of the writing is the letters these two characters exchange.
This book reminds me of some classic novels that also are somewhat polarizing.
!Romeo and Juliet, (I know a play), Tale of Two Cities, O Henry Gift of the Magi!<
The creative forms the letters take were fun for me and seemed like a valid extrapolation of actual historical spycraft if you assumed much greater ability to manipulate matter. However some people find them over the top.
It is an exuberant, enthusiastic book that is fun if you like it and possibly cringy if you don’t
I wish I had enjoyed this book, as the fanfare around it was delicious and fun, and the authors seem by all intents and purposes like good people who deserve good things. Alas! It was not the book for me.
For me, ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’ is a love story that vaguely dabbles and wanders in a sci-fi landscape. The descriptions are lovely, I will completely agree to that, but after the 6th or so time where I lost track of what they were even talking about in that sea of nature-inspired metaphors, I lost interest.
The setting for this book is barely existent. There is a time war, sure. There are two sides at war, yeah I got that. What’s it about? How does it work? Are there different universes, or just different times? And how do all the times affect each other? No clue, not a thought, not for us to consider.
I prefer my sci-fi romances to be action packed, character infested, dramatic fanfares through space that you can almost taste on the tip of your thought. This book had an interesting plot clincher (a war that’s been going on for so long no one knows why or what for and the main players have literally transcended real existence into being space ether) but it didn’t really explore much of that, and as such I didn’t particular enjoy it, even if I liked that one the characters got called “Blue-da-ba-dee”, my favourite cocktail drink.
I thought this was really well fleshed out, to the wibbly wobbly timey wimey extent that these things can be managed. They each hale from a very different potential far future where humanity has reached an end state of technology, either mechanical or biological. Each side is trying to alter history to make their potential future become the actual future. The bio-organic Blue sabotages advancements in computer technology for example, or Red goes back and plants the seeds of the discovery of the transistor. The two timelines merge at a ‘wall’ in the recent past, and it’s almost impossible for them to exist in the others’ timeline after that point.