This is How You Lose the Time War - I loved it but I understand why some hate it
After giving This is How You Lose the Time War a five star review, I started scrolling through other reviews and I found thoughtful, well reasoned arguments for the other side. This is a thoroughly crafted well written book that is not going to be to everyone's taste.
The premise is two opposing secret agents, saboteurs, time and history manipulators who work for conflicting civilizations become aware of each other and start to exchange letters. It becomes a love story.
The nature of the work each main character does to manipulate history across many centuries and many parallel universes makes the narrative confusing. I can't imagine it done effectively any other way, but I also like other confusing time shifting stories where the story starts to make sense later.
The characters only meet through their letters with a couple of exceptions, so some say the love story is unbelievable. For me, it reflects the extreme isolation and loneliness of their work and how even minimal tenuous companionship of a peer would satisfy a gaping need.
The writing includes extravagant romantic feelings and poetic literary allusions to go with the science fiction and time travel aspect. I appreciated it, but people who like romance and poetry don't always like science fiction and time travel and vice versa.
The authors lean into the epistolary format. It's not exclusively letters but a significant percentage of the writing is the letters these two characters exchange.
The creative forms the letters take were fun for me and seemed like a valid extrapolation of actual historical spycraft if you assumed much greater ability to manipulate matter. However some people find them over the top.
It is an exuberant, enthusiastic book that is fun if you like it and possibly cringy if you don't
It's such an enjoyable book if you're ok letting both the typical formats of both fiction and the very concept of people be bent and broken.
Yes. It has transhumanist themes.
It is an epistolary novel written in large part through love letters. Other epistolary novels I have enjoyed include Up the Down Staircase, 84 Charing Cross Road, the Guernsey literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Dracula. and I have more on my to read list.
The characters move between parallel universes and backwards and forwards in time like they are navigating a jungle. They are agents not generals or spymasters and the reader gets limited information about what is going on. The time shifts are confusing like Slaughterhouse Five is confusing or Catch 22.
I found there were lots of good ideas in there, but in the end I found it a bit too clever for its own good. It reminded me a lot of The Midnight Library, in that the author had found a great idea, but hadn't quite managed to bring it to fruition.
Specifically for Time War, I think my main issue was that the flowery prose got in the way of the important parts of the story. The background and the plot and the mystery were all great, but I never felt invested in the characters, and I never felt like I got to know them at all. Most of the time, I couldn't even tell them apart - I kept on having to go back to the start of the chapter and think "okay, this is to Blue, so it's from Red, and Red is the one who did this and that" just so I could figure out which one was which. I feel like this is especially disappointing in a book entirely told through letters - rather than lean into each letter-writer having their own writing style and identity, they just felt like they were letters to and from the same person.
Interestingly, the bits that stick with me are the narrative parts (the interstitials and the latter narrative section) rather than the letters, I think because, free of the need to create such flowery texts, the author finally can get down to what makes this sort of story interesting, namely the characters and their internal stresses, motivations, desires, fears, etc.
Alternatively, there's a version of Time War that works great without differentiating the characters so much, but I think that version is significantly shorter and gets published in a collection of other short stories, rather than as a standalone book.
I felt similarly that both characters were indistinguishable through most of the story for me. By the end I finally had a sense of it, but it didn't allow the kind of growth and adaptation I felt was intended by the story. Both were playing the role of the "good soldier" slowly being corrupted. Both wrote in the same flowery prose. Both often resorted to awkward dialogue like "Dearest Blue-da-ba-dee" which really removed me from the story.
Though honestly, I can't fault it. I think romance is just not my genre, as much as I wanted to give it a chance. I was much more interested in understanding the backstory of the time war and how the different races had evolved, but that just wasn't the story the author wanted to tell. That's completely fair, and I don't expect every book to be suited to me.
Judging by the reviews, a lot of people really enjoyed this book, and I'm glad they were able to.
This is one of my favourite books but interesting I've only listened to it as an audio book which has different narrators for Red and Blue. Means no issues in telling them apart and the different performances might also help in terms of making the characters more distinct than in text. Absolutely worth a go if you do listen to audio books.
Interesting. I hated Midnight Library. But I agree that it was an ambitious project that could have been done better. I still had fun with it.
I think of it as The Time Traveler's Wife (one of my favorite books) meets The Screwtape Letters.
Mild spoilers for both books
One of the most interesting parts of both books is how the time travel makes a closed loop out of the events that led to the relationship, like the way Henry and Claire raise each other. TTW deals with the philosophical implications of this a lot more. It is not very happy, but it is fascinating.
Thanks for mentioning Screwtape.
I found the book interesting and it was good enough for me to finish it when I'm not afraid to DNF things I'm not enjoying. That said I didn't love it.
The story was interesting but really weak and just not fleshed out enough for me to care about the time war or either side or even what was actually happening. The romance also did nothing for me if anything it seemed to come out of nowhere and I just couldn't understand why they felt that way about each other. I could see them being able to relate to each other as the only 2 really in the same situation but I just didn't 'get it'.
I guess it's just not my kind of SF or love story which is a shame because I wanted to like it but I'm glad that there's room for new artistic or novel ways of doing speculative fiction to become big successes and it being popular is great for the genre overall.
If someone shares the format for spoilers, I will add additional details.
You can copy the block below to put spoilers in a dropdown:
It will end up looking like this:
Spoilers
Your spoiler text goes here.
Thank you. I checked the wiki but it wasn't there.
It's the last section of the formatting help page, under the heading "Expandable sections".