The Makings of a Masterpiece

This Is How You Lose the Time War

Note for readers: As I mentioned last time, I’m currently dialing back to one post per week. In the meantime I’ll share some of my fiction writing when possible, including this short piece I wrote last week. Thanks as always for reading!

Short & Sweet

There are a lot of massive books out there! I'm currently (slowly) reading Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, a historical epic spanning over 800 pages (my mass market paperback is 990). I also just finished Empire of Silence, over 600 pages in print and over 26 hours on audio. (Here's my review, since I mentioned it a couple posts back.) I also love the novels of The Stormlight Archive, the shortest of which is 1001 pages long.

In contrast, This Is How You Lose the Time War barely clocks in over 200 pages. I'm currently listening to it for the fourth time and can honestly say it's just as good now as on my first listen, as I continue to appreciate new intricacies and meanings. It's strange to say, but this short novel sometimes feels like it has more depth than any of the above – despite their being three, four and five times its size. (Of course, different books have different purposes. House of Leaves, for example, is both plenty long and near-infinitely complex.)

So, what goes into making such a rich and memorable novel?

Red & Blue, by Laya Rose

Concept & World

I doubt anyone else would start here, but the ideas behind This Is How You Lose the Time War were what initially hooked me in and helped me enjoy the rest of it. Plus it gives me the opportunity to explain what the novel's about, in case you're unfamiliar.

Our characters are on opposing sides of a war over what the future of the universe will look like. To quote myself:

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.

It's hard to express how much I love this concept; these two realities fighting for existence with all of time and space as their battleground. If either side should tip the balance, the other will never have been.

Of course, this is made all the crunchier by having Red and Blue embody their respective futures. Each weaves the strands of time by essentially weaponizing the butterfly effect and thereby shaping the future for their side. The two first make contact based on mutual respect and develop a relationship through exchanged letters, which take a wide variety of forms.

Yet both Red and Blue understand that if they win, their rival/love will be erased. Thus the true, Romeo and Juliet-esque conflict of the book emerges: the pair against the world, both their futures wanting them destroyed.

Somehow authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone envisioned a story with stakes which simultaneously span all the multiverse and the dreams of just two characters. Completely brilliant.

Red & Blue, by Noctilia

Poetry & Prose

The writing in this book is beautiful. It's technically prose, but it gave me an appreciation for poetry that twelve years of English and Language Arts classes never came close to matching. It also spans the spectrum of tone, with different passages being deeply heartfelt, funny, awestruck and so much more.

Take just this one paragraph, sent by Red to Blue, etched into the scales of a cod swallowed by a seal off the coast of Newfoundland – and Blue's later response:

“I consulted the literature on scents and wax seals, as you suggested. It’s all a bit counterintuitive, this business of communication through base matter. Closing a letter—a physical object without even a ghost in the cloud, all that data on one frail piece of paper—with an even more malleable substance, bearing, of all things, an ideographic signature! Informing any handler of the message’s sender, her role, perhaps even her purpose! Madness—from an operational-security perspective. But, as the prophets say, there ain’t no mountain high enough—so I’ve essayed the work here. I hope you enjoy your whacked seal. I didn’t supply any extra scent, but the medium has a savor all its own.” – Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War “I should tell you, as Mrs. Leavitt would, that it’s customary to send letters that can be opened without ruining the seal, but I appreciate your innovation more than I can say.” – Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

Part of Red and Blue's bond grows through a playful discussion of letters themselves; Blue recommends Mrs. Leavitt's Guide to Etiquette and Correspondence to Red early on, helpfully showing why and how the pair's conversation takes this form. It's an easily overlooked aspect of the book, but one which bears a surprising amount of weight in establishing the format and relationship.

Then you see Red reflecting on the fragile nature of these messages, an observation heightened by the digital future she comes from, built on information security. Following that is a reference to our own world, always amusingly attributed to 'the prophets', and a clever double-meaning of 'essayed' – Red's both trying to put what she's learned into practice and has created a short piece of writing on a particular topic.

Top it off with a 'whacked [killed] seal' in place of a wax seal and Blue's later response, and I hope you begin to get a sense of how fun and engaging this book is.

I also partly attribute this brilliance to how the book was conceived, with Max Gladstone writing Red's letters and Amal El-Mohtar writing Blue's. Two amazing authors and great friends consistently aiming to one-up and impress one another, very much like the character's they're portraying. Competition brings excellence and whatnot.

Speaking of a team effort, last year I spoke to two friends about this novel in the video below; I'd love if you gave it a watch!

My video discussion of This Is How You Lose the Time War

Letters & Love

“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.” ― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

What can you say; the world loves a rivals-to-lovers arc. Their budding relationship is made all the more fascinating for the fact they never meet face-to-face, instead constrained to their creative means of communicating.

“Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs;” ― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

Red and Blue's intimacy is their communication, ideologically and emotionally infecting each other with every word; compromising each other in the eyes of their superiors. The fact that this is also how they ultimately break free – Red with enough Blue in her to dare walk into Garden; Blue with enough Red to survive the Agency's lethal poison – elevates the power of their relationship to another level entirely.

“I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.” ― Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

As we discussed in the video above, the book depicts a lesbian relationship that also feels more generally, quintessentially queer. Red is a digital program and Blue is a force of nature as much as they are human women; their relationship isn't defined by gender so much as by their shared dream of defying the powers that be, escaping and being together.

By the way, maybe consider reading this book?

Red & Blue, by Laya Rose

You Lose & We Win

As Blue hints at in her very first letter ('this is how we win'), the pair ultimately escape by virtue of their connection and cross-contamination. But this line also connects back to the title, since both the Agency and Garden must continue to 'lose' (continue fighting) their time war in order for Red and Blue to continue existing at the same time. Their future together seems incredibly precarious, but what isn't, really?

I'm sure I'll return to this book again at some point, but that's (almost) enough for now. Bear with just one more favourite quote of mine:

“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.”

Chills, every time. I've read a lot of speculative fiction, but it's truly rare to get a story as special as This Is How You Lose the Time War.

[For the slightly silly explanation of how the book broke in to the mainstream – plus more interesting background info on it – this video has you covered!]

Thanks for reading and until next time <3