Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Does the novelty of This is How You Lose the Time War lie in the authors who penned it, the feminine and LGBTQ themes, the lack of male characters in sci-fi, or the fun reimaging of the time travel subgenre?
Yes.
I was lucky enough to find This is How You Lose the Time War at one of Canada’s best and most well-loved book stores, Novel Idea, and being that it clocks in at only 208 pages, I finished it on the train ride back to Toronto. If it had been a 1, 000 page-long book, I still would have found a way to finish it in a single sitting. I’ve never read anything like it, and I can’t imagine I ever will again.
The first surprise I got while diving into This is How You Lose the Time War was that such a short story had two authors. Maybe it’s silly to think that it’d be longer if there were two people writing it, but it was a strange thought nevertheless. Stranger still is the fact that one of the people who wrote this female-oriented tale is a man, Max Gladstone. A man who’s holding a sword in his author bio picture. Between the picture and the clear feminism, he automatically earned my seal of approval.
And then there’s co-author Amal El-Mohtar (who Google now associates with the question, “how was the time war lost?”). With a career that includes writing poetry, winning awards including a Hugo and a Nebula, and editing a magazine called Goblin Fruit, she’s a lady to envy. It’s clear how she’d come to win such awards, specifically for Time War: her poetic narration makes for a perfect combination of heartbreak and charm and cuts right to the point without an extra word.
Time War is ultimately about two kick-ass, gender-non-conforming, time-traveling robo-ladies who fall in love. There isn’t a man in sight, but there also aren’t very many conventional gender roles. I wish I could say that this isn’t just a big deal; it should be the obvious choice. Sci-fi is generally about the future, so why shouldn't we get to read forward-thinking stories? As someone who was overjoyed that there was an Asian cylon in Battlestar Galactica from 1978, I have to say, I’m more than happy to watch to femme-androgynous robots fall in love. And of course, without men, there can only really be LGBTQ romance. Fun as it is to watch characters realize their sexuality despite their culture or the way they were raised, one of the best things you can do for something progressive, like a gay robot love story, is to normalize it. No men? No heterosexuality? No problem.
Besides, the authors still said, while we’re here, let’s make it feminine. There are several aspects of this story that are distinctly female. One of the coolest, and most fundamental to the plot, is The Braid, the “road” of sorts, winding and entangled, that the characters travel to get from place to place and era to era.
There is nothing new about the time travel genre. You could travel to 1952 to read Bradbury give us the original butterfly effect in A Sound of Thunder, or to 1969 to read about Billy Pilgrim getting unstuck in time because time is not linear. There are a hundred different versions of a thousand different time travel rules. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with new concepts, which is why This is How You Lose the Time War works so well. There’s very little time to explain the rules in so few pages, so the authors assume you know how things work and focus more on an interesting new way of representing it.
Another strength of Time War: if time travel can be confusing, it can lead to ridiculous explanations, plot holes, and meandering plots. The most memorable time travel tales are short stories like Story of Your Life and Slaughterhouse-Five, and they work because there’s no room for error. Time War might be a time travel story, but it’s truly meant to be a poetic, feminist love story; no wild rules, just excellent prose.
Whether you pick up this book for pride, for epic writing, or as a fun addition to the time travel genre, you can’t be disappointed in This is How You Lose the Time War.
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