SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone:

I have a simple formula for reviewing novellas due to their length: One-Two Paragraphs of Introduction before the jump in a post, followed by a single plot summary paragraph and then one, or at most two, paragraph of analysis and critical review.  This works great for most novellas, which have enough substance for single posts but not enough to go too in depth in without spoiling, and usually isn't very hard to pull off: I can usually review a novella in like a third of the time i review a novel.

I mention all of this because I'm going to have an incredibly hard time sticking to this formula and not spending a ton of paragraphs GUSHING over how great This is How You Lose the Time War is.   This novella's two authors couldn't possibly be more regarded in my eyes from their prior work: Gladstone is one of my favorite authors and his latest novel (Empress of Forever) was incredible, honestly, and while I haven't read much of El-Mohtar's short fiction, what I have read has been damn good (and worthy of a Hugo a few years back).  And honestly?  This might top all of their previous work, in all its glory: a time-traveling epistolary romance between agents of very different worlds, that is just so so damn good.


Plot Summary:  Throughout the annals of time, across seemingly infinite parallel universes, two organizations battle for supremacy, adjusting events in time in each universe to produce a future more to the liking of that organization.  The Agency, based on a technological future, and The Garden, based on an ecological one, "battle" each other not directly, but through their agents attempting to make changes here and there to guide things the right way.  Red is an agent of the Agency, and maybe their best such agent, and has never met a challenge she didn't think she could defeat.  But on one such mission, in the aftermath of what seems like certain success, she discovers traces of defeat instead, the work of Garden's maybe top agent, the one called Blue.  More than that she discovers Blue has left a message in her own way, to gloat and communicate.  And well, there's no alternative for Red but to thwart Blue's next mission and for Red to leave her own message in response.  And so it begins. 

Throughout all these timelines, as Red and Blue thwart each other anew and leave messages for each other, they come to know each other more than they ever thought they could.  And soon the goals of their interactions are no longer to thwart the other....but to leave and receive the messages themselves instead, as both Red and Blue begin to hunger for something unspeakable, something.....impossible.

Thoughts:   Oh God, where do I start?  I feel bad about the first half of the plot summary being about the setting of this story, because it's probably the least important thing about it, but what can I do.  This novella, until events at the end, is based around letters, with each chapter alternating between following Red or Blue on a mission throughout time and space until they find a letter "written"* in some strange way somewhere from the other.

*I say "written", because through technology and seemingly-magic these letters are written in the most fantastical ways in the most unusual places in a way to make them even more charming than they already are.*

And again, this story is quite clearly a romance at its heart, and it's just written so damn well: you can see how Red and Blue, despite basically never meeting directly in the flesh, start to fall for each other in each letter, from beginning to end, and I grew to care so much about each of them despite neither of them having a constant form or much of an existence outside of what they describe to each other.  The letters are constantly amusing as the two play word games with each other for most of the story, with references here and there to real world texts and things, but these references somehow never feel shewed in.  And the various places and times Red and Blue visit, to say nothing of the ways they leave each other letters, are just such a great use of the time travel/parallel universe setting to color the romance in unique and touching ways.

And the ending is just perfect honestly.  I said on twitter that the sign of a truly great story is when you can see where it is going but you don't care, you just want to read on to see how it gets there, and that's definitely the case here: I, and I suspect many readers, could see one part of the final twist coming from a mile away, and I loved it all the same.

Yeah you should all read this, and it will be on the top of my Hugo Ballot next year.  For sure.