Genre Fiction
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![Amal El-Mohtar - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_amal_elmohtar.jpg)
This Is How You Lose the Time War
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.
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.
Editorial Reviews
* "[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
"...
"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
"...
Readers Top Reviews
LoshaHeather L. H
It's a Love Story. And in the best way possible. 'Time War' feels like you're spying on an infinite swirl of possibilities. We dance through past and future with two incredible entities that can effect both as they traverse parallel worlds. This book read like poetry to me. There are so many fantastic, mind-tickling, lyrical descriptions to savor. Upon finishing, I immediately reread the 1st chapter which cemented my plan to devour this book again sooner than later. Simply anticipate now knowing what is happening at 1st. Then let this book woo you into understanding ;)
Jeremy DennyLosha
Really enjoyable to mix up the kind of books you read now and again and this was a fun one. I'd recommend it to most people
Nick Wisseman (au
Letters are many things in Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War. Taunts between foes. Invitations to friendship. Missives of love. They are also, at various points, tree rings, magma, and bubbles. (Seal guts are involved at one point too.) This epistolary novella begins as a contest between two time travelers, the preeminent members of competing organizations bent on shaping the multiverse to fit their respective visions. Red works for the Agency, a technologically advanced version of humanity that’s implanted her with weapons and armor and pseudo-skin that can change form as required. Blue works for Garden, an organic hivemind whose members have evolved natural corollaries to these tools of destruction and deception. When deployed against each other, Red and Blue are “equal and opposite reaction[s],” as Blue terms them at one point, “a microcosm … of the war as a whole.” Their struggle is the next thing to endless. Both are essentially immortal, capable of playing the longest of long games in one “strand” (i.e., potential timeline) after another. They might live out an entire life advising a variation of Genghis Khan, for example, and then skip to a resulting future to alter the outcome of a space battle, before circling back to a connecting past to ensure that the wind in an underground labyrinth “whistles over the right fluted bones,” so that “one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with child in a storm, and so it goes.” Sometimes these actions seem noble, like immunizing Native Americans centuries before contact with Europeans. But in other missions Red and Blue massacre millions. And it wears. Early in the time war, it was probably easy for these adversaries to shrug off the psychic toll levied by their work—why bother with morality when there are multitudes, when London has so many incarnations they’re labeled with numbers and letters? Yet after eons of plotting and maneuvering and killing, the war goes on, and Red and Blue have little to show for their service. Except their rivalry. One-upping each other becomes a new challenge. Not just in the field—although they do plenty of showing off there too (subtle and otherwise). But after Blue rubs in a victory by sending Red a letter that can only be read by burning it, Red responds with a message that can only be read by boiling. From there, they concoct increasingly elaborate ways to continue their correspondence. In the process, their relationship changes, morphing from competition to curiosity to … something more. It’s a fascinating tale. The prose borders on poetry—mostly to the good, although I occasionally had troubl...
Reader By The Wat
This tiny book (209 pages!) was a double-expresso shot of love and science fiction. But to extend the coffee metaphor, this isn’t for a reader looking for a sweet, fluffy drink with little to no bite. This is “turn down the music and pay attention” reading to keep up with the time/universe travel/manipulation. “She combs or snarls the strands of time’s braid with the finesse or brutality required of her, and leaves.” “She climbs upthread and down; she braids and unbraids history’s hair.” Every word is carefully chosen and placed, and nothing is given away, yet the lines are lyrically beautiful. Like, stop, re-read the line and let it soak in. THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE A TIME WAR rocked my world and blew my mind. Whew! Tim Ferriss was right about it. Does this sound like your kind of story, or are you backing away slowly, palms out, with no eye contact?
GrejamReader By T
This starts as two adversaries taunting each other in letters. They’re both talented agents but bored. They don’t meet except from afar and through the letters. Details are missing (how do-they travel through time?) and story becomes mushy but its still interesting .
Short Excerpt Teaser
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...
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...
