Book Review: This Is How You Lose the Time War

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Some books are meals and some are aperitifs, and This Is How You Lose the Time War is the prettiest aperitif on the sci-fi shelf: a lyrical, poetic jaunt through a love affair conducted in letters between two rival time agents. The internet rediscovers this novella every few years and sends it back up the bestseller charts, and I understand the impulse completely. I also finished it hungry.

The spoiler-free setup: two agents on opposite sides of a war across time — Red, built for a gleaming technological future, and Blue, grown from a lush organic one — start leaving each other taunting letters across the braided strands of history. The taunting turns into correspondence, and the correspondence into something neither of their empires would forgive. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone wrote it as a duet, trading voices, and the letters themselves are most of the book.

What I Loved About This Is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar and Gladstone

The prose. Line for line this is some of the prettiest writing in modern sci-fi, dense with wordplay and images that earn the word poetic instead of just applying for it. The epistolary conceit is a real delight (love letters as espionage, espionage as courtship), and at this length the whole thing goes down in an afternoon, fun and fast and strange. There are individual letters in here I’d frame.

What I Didn’t Love About This Is How You Lose the Time War

My biggest wish is that Red and Blue had been better defined and more sharply contrasted against each other. Their letters sing, but their voices blur together, and since the book asks you to fall in love with them through voice alone, the blur costs it real emotional altitude. Distinguishing two voices on the page happens to be my day job, so I may grade this harder than most readers will. But I spent much of the book adjusting to a setting that changes every chapter, without enough grounding or world building to hold onto, and the plot and characters end up a little two-dimensional as a result. Mostly I think the story needed more room — there’s a version of this with another hundred pages that sets its stage properly, and I suspect that version would have wrecked me. This one impressed me instead.

Final Thoughts on This Is How You Lose the Time War

Best enjoyed exactly as what it is: a longform poetic montage rather than a full story, gorgeous and gone in a sitting. Read it for the sentences and calibrate for the scale. And if you want your time-bending sci-fi with a complete plot engine attached, Recursion and Dark Matter are right over here doing donuts in the parking lot.

My final score: 3 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes — as the aperitif, not the meal.

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