“This Is How You Lose the Time War”, Amar El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Published July 16, 2019
In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked "Burn before reading."
So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space.
Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they're the best, and they're alone.
Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning's that you do in war. Isn't it?
“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’m not usually drawn to epistolary stories, but this one not only broke all the rules, it rewrote them in poetry and stardust and blood. The letters between Red and Blue were tender and fierce, razor-sharp yet achingly intimate. Each message was a game, a dare, a love song disguised as a battlefield report. The shift from rivalry to fascination creeps up on you until you find yourself invested in their sapphic love story.
Content Warnings
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of content and trigger warnings.
death • war • violence
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Owned: thrifted paperback