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This Is How You Lose the Time War (a review)




The pandemic of 2020 has been a terrible blow to many, many people. I don’t have to enumerate the ways. Everyone has been affected in one way or another. And yet, if you look for silver linings in bad times, you can usually find some. They in no way, make up for the bad aspects of pandemic, but you need to appreciate the little tokens that chance throws your way. A case in point: I am a lover of science fiction, but have never made it to (nor probably ever will make it to) the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) to see the Hugo Awards. This year it was set for New Zealand, and much as I would have like to have seen it, New Zealand was just never going to be in the cards for me. But because of Covid-19, The Hugo Awards were live streamed this year. I actually got to watch it live and hear acceptance speeches and everything. There were a few technical glitches, but that is to be expected, and they didn’t detract from the overall presentations.

This year’s winner for Best Novella was This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I had heard some buzz about this story previously, so I ordered it from our library (which has fortunately found ways to get books to patrons in spite of the pandemic!) As the title suggest, there is a war going on for the control of Time. Our two main characters are Red, and Blue. They are enemies. Each one fights for their respective side in the war, altering timelines to try to achieve whatever end their commanders are trying to achieve. Red works for the side called The Agency, while blue works for Garden. Cause and effect; effect and cause. They manipulate. They frame. They kill. Shunting the strands of time for their respective and mysterious ends.

They are both very good at their jobs, in fact they may be the best weapons that each side has to offer. Each sees the other side as evil, the same way that a child born in 1950’s America would have seen the Soviet Union as evil, or a child born in the Soviet Union would have seen America as evil. It is the culture that they know. Red and Blue start out with unquestioned loyalty for their respective sides. Nonetheless, somehow these two rival agents strike up a correspondence. Much of the book is told in an epistolary fashion, with each character depositing a cleverly hidden and coded letter for the other to read and destroy.

In some ways it reminded me of Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear, which coincidentally, also won the Hugo for Best Novella (1980). There are significant differences in the two novellas, but in both cases, we are rooting for the two antagonists, and we are rooting for their relationship to develop. Red and Blue both have upbringings that are so foreign to our way of thinking that it is difficult to grasp, but the way they were raised explains and defines their characters. These two super time spies are bizarrely alien to us, to the point that we wonder if they are still human.  And yet, they could teach us all a thing or two about what it means to be human.  As my theater friend is fond of saying: this one has all the feels.

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).


Link to Star Liner

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