This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose The Time War focuses on two time travelers, Blue and Red.  These two women work for agencies who want to bend time to their will.  While on a mission, Red finds a message, “Burn before Reading.”  This sparks a series of correspondence, hidden messages, between the two time travelers.  How will this friendship between these two sworn enemies end?

Tons of people just love this book, but I couldn’t get into it.  My attention kept wandering off.  This review is my attempt to pinpoint what went wrong.

First, This is How You Lose the Time War involves time travel, and it is underwhelming.  Part of this is due to the narrator who seems to be quite detached.  The death and destruction are just another day at the office.  However, the detachment did not build suspense.  I practiced immersion reading in this book, and even the audiobook narrators seemed very bored and detached.  If I could go back, I think I would have been better served if I read this book without the audiobook.

Second, when you think back through history, there are a few moments in time that would likely have changed history:  the invention of indoor plumbing, electricity, computers, mobile phones, the internet, the forming of nations.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to tag along and see these events unfold?  You will not find these events in this book though.

It is also interesting to think of events in time, because even if you stopped them, are they inevitable?  For example, if Netflix didn’t exist, Hulu would probably still pop up.  If you stopped the invention of electricity, would it just be invented a few years later? 

This is How You Lose The Time War is not completely horrible.  It discusses interesting topics and does have some unique features.

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?”  This quote really got me thinking.  Letters are time traveling.  For example, when I write a letter and stick it in an envelope, and someone reads it ten years later, my thoughts are traveling through time.  When I write the letter, I will have no idea the condition of the reader or the social, economic, political, or technological landscape.  A problem that I have today might be irrelevant in the future.  It is a very interesting concept, time traveling by letter.

The most interesting thing about this book is the way that Red and Blue communicate.  They communicate using a different medium every time.  They understood each other.

Please note that the text copy on Scribd of This is How You Lose The Time War does not seem to be very accurate.  When I was listening to the audiobook, I noticed that the book had prophet when the word was poet.  The text also had something about a Trojan hoarse. 

Overall, This is How You Lose The Time War is an average fantasy novel with underwhelming time travel elements.

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