“When Red wins, she stands alone.”
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War, 2019
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“This Is How You Lose the Time War” is a unique epistolary novel set in a dystopian universe where two factions clash for supremacy of time and space. Red and Blue are the elite champions for their corresponding sides in the combat. What begins as a coded message from Blue (decoded by Red), left as a taunt after the latest battle in a series of infinite checkmates, turns into a correspondence as the adversaries embed clandestine letters to each other up and down the intricate braid of time.
Very few books are written using the “epistolary” technique. “Epistle” is the Greek word for a written message addressed to another, as in a letter. Some famous “epistolary” works are Bram Stoker’s Dracula (a collection of journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings), C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (a series of letters exchanged between devils), and Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon (a journal of progress reports written by the human test subject of an experimental surgery).
Red and Blue’s epistles to each other are ephemerally concealed in sites at key moments of the conflict between The Agency and Garden (the two sides of the Time War) and intended to be read by its recipient only once: An MRI readout from a jar of boiling water, the audible tones of an assembled mobile made of bones in the deepest caverns of a sacred sepulcher, the fleeting shapes of tea leaves steeping in a fine china teacup.
The two authors of “This Is How You Lose the Time War” write alternating chapters: El-Mohtar is the voice of Blue, and Gladstone replies as Red. They wrote the book one chapter at a time, responding in character to their corresponding letters. The result, despite the fantastical settings, feels very genuine and real.
This book is ultimately about how love causes us to defy conventions and break our allegiances, the nature of sacrifice and trust, and all the things a girl stands to gain when she loses the time war.