I Read ‘This Is How You Lose the Time War’ by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

I have built a reading regimen that has lasted since the beginning of the pandemic. Every day, I’ll wake up and read for an hour until I get through whatever book I have. That took me through several months with Infinite Jest, and books of similar girth but knowing that I’ll be back tomorrow makes it easier to consume all in all. I don’t try to carve times into my day to “have to” get through something. Of course, if there are times when I’m loving a book so much I’ll want to engage with it throughout the day or extend my hour, I certainly will, but one hour a day has gotten me through quite a great deal of books over the last 3 years. It doesn’t grant me a ton of time to sit with a book if I know I want to blast through something, but it’s just enough time every day that I can sit with some words and sit with a story and become engaged in something other than the here and now.

With this book, however, I not only sat with it for the standard hour in the morning, I sat with it for three. Then I revisited it in the early afternoon and again later in the evening. I finished this book in a single day, and that’s not something that I can often say. This is an epistolary novel, one that’s not long or overly challenging, but one that was definitely served best by completing it in the smallest amount of time possible.

There are two styles happening in this book, and they are oscillating back and forth. I will begin by telling you that if the concept of A Time War sounds intriguing and wildly exciting to you, that HELL yes, it did to me too. But you wont’ find it here. No, the time war here is (are) the settings through which are two characters are engaging in their battle, then their cumulatively endearing conversations which are extended through letters left for one another in different settings, different times, different realities. I would say that this portion of the book, the “action” scenes, were the most confusing. I enjoyed the sense of sitting or acting with these characters through these chapters, but I was more appreciative of the fact that we got to hear some inner dialog of how the characters were thinking and worrying and being excited. It was the fuel that the letters needed, the motives of different sentences, the reflection on the lines they had just read. Sure. These are opposing warriors engaged in active combat across eons and different strands of time and space, but when we whittle down the content: these are two people who are working conflicting roles and yet they are finding common ground through one another.

I would hesitate to dig too deeply into a theme here, but I can see that one aspect of this book is the idea that in war or combat or conflict, when we get down to the ‘human’ level, most of us are generally the same and we feel the same way about many things, often including our endgames. We mostly want the same happiness, the same comfort.. We just happen to be born on two different sides of an angry fence. This book touches on that concept somewhat, though it doesn’t address it with eye contact. It is the circumstance we find ourselves in here, but I don’t think the book really harps too heavily into the War portion of it overall in general. We know who these people are and we know what their jobs are within their societies. We know that one comes from a hyper-organic race and the other from a hyper-technology race and they are vying for position within the space-time continuum and our two authors are direct rivals of one another. Knowing who they are is important in the fact that we need to know that their communication is forbidden. But just as the Time War is a blurred background context, so too is the Nature of War and all the implications that ride on the back of that.

Where the novel[la] finds its momentum is in the absolutely stunning, the gorgeous writing of the letters that these two people share back and forth. There is hardly a way to talk about this book without “spoiling” it, but I’m less concerned about that than I am in reducing the quality of the language used in the book in a way that is so profoundly beautiful that it did what many masterclasses of writing will do in that it simultaneously inspired me to want to write a billion letters to a billion people but also to never set pen to paper again. The yearning, the anger, the courage… the way that these letters are constructed is hard to believe that it’s fiction.

I will change gears a bit to encourage you to write more letters. The way that we sit down with a blank page in front of us and bare our penmanship to another, one that we seal and send away, one that we can imagine the other person reading and wait with unbreakable trembling, hoping we said the right thing, made the right joke, didn’t say too much but shared just enough to get back that gilded language, sealed directly to us and stamped/signed by the person we initially sent something to: there’s a beauty in that choreography alone. Being in a long-distance relationship for two years, it’s something that I got all too used to. It’s something that while it made the distance excruciating, there was a single thread that we could share back and forth, like two tin cans pulled taut, and in this we could share in ways that felt like a secret shared, a secret we would bury between us. The boxes of letters, even if they’re never reopened, just seeing them sealed together in a volume of history… there’s something universally affirming about it. I was here. We were here. This was us. This thought was on fire and it burned its way to you.

The nerves you feel while writing and reading are an experience that is only felt in just this correspondence.

This book made me feel that same kind of thing again. The words within are poetry. They aren’t expressed in such a way, not stylized or stanza’d or schemed. But they are the raw words and emotions that feel mined from authentic places. They reflect that the earth they were born on and the places they have visited haven’t invented sights or sounds or sentiments enough to be contextualized and sent between two people. Sometimes you have to invent new nations, new designs, new biologies to say just the thing you were rushing to say. All of the “I can’t wait to show you” energy arrives big time throughout this one.

Maybe only because I’ve lived something like this, something that wore this same disguise, but I highly recommend this one. If for nothing else, to inspire you to get the address of Someone and sit down at a notebook and write something for Them, to get as much onto paper as you can, to seal it, send it, and to never see it again except in the face of the recipient. Maybe, if for nothing else, to feel something beyond what you can reach.