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This Is How You Lose the Time War

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This Is How You Lose the Time War
AuthorAmal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Audio read byCynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller
LanguageEnglish
Genre
PublisherSaga Press
Pages208
ISBN9781534431003
OCLC1033576552

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a 2019 science fiction fantasy LGBT epistolary novel by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It was first published by Simon & Schuster. It won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novella,[1][2] the 2020 Locus Award for Best Novella, the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella.[3]

Plot

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Agents Red and Blue travel back and forth through time, altering the history of multiple universes on behalf of their warring empires, whose timelines are mutually exclusive. In secret, the two begin leaving each other messages — initially taunting, but gradually developing into flirtation, and then love. When Red's commanding officer detects the interaction between Red and Blue, she forces Red to send Blue a message that will poison her when read. Even though Red warns Blue of the danger, she reads the message and succumbs to the poison anyway, fearing Red’s treason will be discovered if she does not.

Some time later, Red, now listless and distraught, finds another message hinting that Blue faked her own death. Red returns to each point in their correspondence and collects traces of Blue’s DNA from her letters, allowing her to sneak into Blue's empire and give her immunity to the poison during childhood, an episode related in an earlier letter. This incident is discovered and Red is arrested by her own empire; the day before her scheduled execution, Red receives a final letter from Blue indicating that she is breaking her out of prison and inviting her to fight together against both their empires.

Writing process

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Red's letters were written entirely by Gladstone, and Blue's by El-Mohtar. Although they wrote a general outline beforehand, "the reactions of each character were developed with a genuine element of surprise on receiving each letter, and the scenes accompanying [the letters] were written using that emotional response".[4]

Reception

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Publishers Weekly called This Is How You Lose the Time War "exquisitely crafted" and "dazzling", with "increasingly intricate wordplay", and stated that it "warrants multiple readings".[5] NPR's Jason Sheehan compared it to the film The Lake House (if one "strapped [The Lake House] up in body armor, covered it with razors, dipped it in poison and set it loose to murder and burn its way across worlds and centuries"), and said that the book makes a virtue of what he felt to be the characteristic weaknesses of both the time travel genre and the epistolary format.[6]

Cheryl Morgan argued that its central message—"soldiers on either side of a war often have far more in common with each other than they do with the people who sit safely at home and issue orders"—is one "that the world needs to hear".[7] Tor.com's Lee Mandelo found in the book "a poetic internal structure", prose that was "sharp, almost crisp" rather than "lush", and a "focus [which] remains on the personal as opposed to the global"; Mandelo also observed that it "has an argument to make—several, actually—about conflict, love, and resistance", and treats the time war as "an object lesson, a conceit, the unending and reason-less conflict that consumes generations, centuries, now and forever."[8]

Den of Geek's Natalie Zutter praised the novel's approach to gender identity: Red and Blue "both use she/her pronouns, but neither fits the heteronormative mold of femininity"; each of them "performs gender in a dozen different ways", such that "[t]he more that Blue and Red appear in different forms, the less their gender actually matters."[9]

At Strange Horizons, Adri Joy lauded the novel as "an absolute emotional masterpiece, sending readers on a gut-wrenching feelings rollercoaster of the highest calibre." She noted that "the Time War itself [...] is largely incomprehensible beyond its most basic points", but specified that "every little aside of... description works to set the scene in the most effective possible way", including the "impermanence" of the messages delivered between Red and Blue. [4]

Black Gate found it to be neither "a riddle to parse" nor "a tangled, hard sci-fi puzzle-box of time travel to unravel", with its final revelation being "fairly obvious from the first chapter", but emphasized that the revelation in question was nonetheless "quite emotionally fulfilling", ultimately concluding that "it's fun to watch goddesses fall in love [...] and Blue and Red feel very much human."[10]

Awards

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This Is How You Lose the Time War won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019,[1] the 2020 Locus Award for Best Novella,[11] the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella,[3] the 2020 Aurora Award for Best Short Fiction,[12] and was a finalist for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award in the Novella category.[13] Additionally, it was a finalist for the inaugural Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction at the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes;[14] and for the 2019 Kitschies in the Novel category; [15] and achieved second place in the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.[16]

Social media

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In May 2023, three years after its release, This Is How You Lose the Time War received an unexpected boost in popularity, ascending Amazon's bestseller rankings to number three overall and number one in science fiction.[17] This was because of a viral tweet by a fan of the manga and anime series Trigun with the display name "bigolas dickolas wolfwood" who recommended the book to their followers.[18][19] "I do not understand what is happening but I am incomprehensibly grateful to bigolas dickolas", El-Mohtar wrote in response.[20]

Adaptation

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El-Mohtar announced in 2019 that the book has been optioned for television, with scripts to be written by herself and Gladstone. She also specified that the genders of the characters "are not up for negotiation".[7]

References

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  1. ^ a b 2019 Nebula Award Finalists Announced Archived 2020-02-20 at the Wayback Machine, at Science Fiction Writers of America, published February 20, 2020; retrieved February 20, 2020
  2. ^ Liptak, Andrew (2020-05-30). "Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners!". Tor.com. Archived from the original on 2021-01-20. Retrieved 2020-05-31.
  3. ^ a b 2020 Hugo Awards Announced Archived 2020-08-17 at the Wayback Machine, at The Hugo Awards; retrieved August 1, 2020
  4. ^ a b THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR BY MAX GLADSTONE AND AMAL EL-MOHTAR Archived 2019-10-10 at the Wayback Machine, reviewed by Adri Joy, at Strange Horizons; published September 9, 2019; retrieved October 27, 2019
  5. ^ This Is How You Lose the Time War Archived 2020-06-14 at the Wayback Machine, reviewed at Publishers Weekly; published March 14, 2019; retrieved October 27, 2019
  6. ^ Letters Serve To Bond Time-Traveling Rivals In 'This Is How You Lose The Time War' Archived 2019-10-25 at the Wayback Machine, by Jason Sheehan, at National Public Radio; published July 18, 2019; retrieved October 27, 2019
  7. ^ a b This is How You Lose the Time War Archived 2021-01-24 at the Wayback Machine, by Cheryl Morgan, at Cheryl-Morgan.com; retrieved October 27, 2019
  8. ^ To Encourage Reach Exceeding Grasp: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Archived 2019-11-15 at the Wayback Machine, by Lee Mandelo, at Tor.com; published July 16, 2019; retrieved October 27, 2019
  9. ^ This Is How You Lose the Time War Solves the Time Traveler’s Wife Problem Archived 2019-07-16 at the Wayback Machine, by Natalie Zutter, at Den of Geek; published July 15, 2019; retrieved October 27, 2019
  10. ^ This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone Archived 2019-07-15 at the Wayback Machine, reviewed by Steve Case, at Black Gate; published July 14, 2019; retrieved October 27, 2019
  11. ^ "2020 Locus Award Winners". 27 June 2020. Archived from the original on 2024-07-03. Retrieved 2020-07-02.
  12. ^ 2020 Aurora Awards Archived 2020-09-21 at the Wayback Machine, at File 770; by Mike Glyer; published August 15, 2020; retrieved August 15, 2020
  13. ^ "Nominees Announced for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards". Archived from the original on May 10, 2019. Retrieved April 28, 2022.
  14. ^ "2019 Book Prize Winners & Finalists". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2020-07-17. Retrieved 2020-06-09.
  15. ^ "2019 Kitschies Shortlists". Locus. 9 March 2020. Archived from the original on 2021-08-21. Retrieved 2020-06-09.
  16. ^ "Suzanne Palmer Wins the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Award". 21 October 2020. Archived from the original on 2022-10-16. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  17. ^ Templeton, Molly (2023-05-11). "The Magic of the Internet Has Turned This Is How You Lose the Time War Into a Belated Bestseller". Tor.com. Archived from the original on 2023-05-31. Retrieved 2023-05-31.
  18. ^ @maskofbun (May 7, 2023). "read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  19. ^ Kircher, Madison Malone (2023-05-12). "When Books Go Viral". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2023-05-13. Retrieved 2023-05-13.
  20. ^ Jiang, Sisi (2023-05-10). "Trigun Fan Account's Tweet Turns Queer Sci-Fi Novel Into An Amazon Bestseller". Kotaku. Archived from the original on 2023-05-10. Retrieved 2023-05-10.
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