Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, We Love “This is How You Lose the Time War” and so Will You

Discussing a book which defies categorization

Shades of Possibility

The future is Red. The world is elegant and crystalline; human minds merging and separating in a vast network, needing no physical shape but capable of taking any, in sleek mechanical design. The Agency monitors and corrects any flaw in the utopian system.

The future is Blue. The world is lush and alive; humans live in wondrous symbiosis with their environment, rigid technology long having proved inferior to clever and flexible evolution. Life is meticulously planted, nurtured and controlled in the utopia of Garden.

These futures are incompatible. To continue existing, one side must destroy the other. Each sends agents into the past, to divert the current of time away from the enemy’s future and toward their own.

This novel is a love story.

Red and Blue’s conflict echoes through time - art by Laya Rose

Red and Blue are opposing agents, sent up- and down-thread to ensure the future that created them comes to fruition. (In the book, up-thread refers to traveling into the past and down-thread into the future.) 

The size and shape of Red and Blue’s individual moves to shape history are as varied as the epithets they use to address one another (more on that in a moment). Whether destroying the creative and scientific minds of Atlantis with an unforeseen volcanic eruption or silently killing one pilgrim who would otherwise have played a necessary role in the foundation of a society, both Red and Blue are weapons aimed by their respective sides at the most pivotal moments in history.

A plethora of letters - art by Kelsi Jo Silva

We arrive at a moment of change in Red and Blue’s conflict across and beyond time; it is unclear how long each has been operating, but they could each have been working towards their side’s goals for centuries or millennia by the time we meet them. What is clear is that they have come to appreciate each other’s elegance and cunning in the strands they weave.

The novel follows these two characters as they exchange ‘letters’ in moments of having thwarted their opponent. The letters take many strange forms: one from Red to Blue is contained in a beaker of water, and must be read via an MRI machine. Another is meticulously crafted by Blue in the growth rings of a forest of trees, only legible through destruction of that natural beauty. The modes of communication are as complex, cruel and beautiful as the messages they contain.

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.” “I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”

― Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War

Struggle, Understand, Love - art by Laya Rose

The novel is written by Ontarian author Amal El-Mohtar - who writes Blue’s letters - and American author Max Gladstone - who writes Red’s. This amplifies the dialogue between Red and Blue wonderfully and (I imagine) it meant the two authors could attempt to surprise and out-do one another. It’s hard to imagine that this book could have been such a triumph of language, imagination and emotion had it been the work of only one person.

I chose this book as the focus of my ‘Passion Project’ for one of my college classes because I love the sheer beauty it presents on every page, and because I truly believe it transcends every genre and categorization that is placed upon it.

A couple of my posts in the past have touched upon my ongoing journey toward understanding both romantic relationships and my own romantic orientation. So while this might not be a typical experience, I think This is How You Lose the Time War also gave me a very helpful example of completely non-physical romance. Red and Blue’s connection is born through mutual admiration, and their fascination grows through continued epistolary exchanges. 

I wonder if Red and Blue see each other as representative of a potential escape from the harsher aspects of their respective societies, beyond the personal connection they begin to cherish.

There is so much to talk about with regards to this lovely novel, and I imagine I’ll post about aspects of it again in the future. 

For now, two of my friends were kind enough to spend some time chatting with me about the book and their experiences with it. Give a listen to my conversation with Laura in podcast form, and some highlights from my conversations with both Joanna and Laura in video form below.

I sincerely hope some part of this project piques your interest enough to check out this book for yourself, so you can see for yourself how much all of our praise falls short of the masterpiece that is This is How You Lose the Time War.