Wednesday, July 17, 2019

This Is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone


This Is How You Lose The Time War is a lot of things. But if you’re just here for the topline, the first of those things is that it’s really, really good. It’s an artful blend of hard-science fiction, high-concept ideas, and emotionally fraught, honest, affecting characterisation, laced through with a complex, believable, thoughtful romance seasoning. And all of this is wrapped up in an epistolary format, as a pair of agents on different sides of a struggle that threatens to tear apart causality start leaving each other notes.

Those writing the letters are referred to only as Red and Blue. They feel almost like concepts more than names. One lives in the boundaries of a timestream dominated by technology; there are sweeping dataspheres, constant communications, constant monitoring, soaring data edifices, that sort of thing. The other comes from a timeline which feels more organic, where the organic is at the heart of philosophy and civilisation.  Both parties are utterly immersed in their conflicting realities, and in their conflict up and down the twisting ladder of time. The prose is fluid and lyrical where it needs to be, and intentionally not when it shouldn’t be – as Red and Blue try the hardest thing, to actually speak to each other. That mastery of language makes this book such a pleasure to read, it’s untrue.  

It’s helped by the fact that both central characters are so very likable. That said, travelling up and down the time-stream as they do, disrupting each other’s work by, say, arranging for Lincoln not to be assassinated, or for Caesar to die a little later than we think of as correct,  has given them both a rather distinct perspective. It bleeds from the letters they send each other, the sense of the long view, of waiting for the right moment to do the right thing, and watching the results cascade outward in a multiplicity of changes. Each of their exchanges is an exercise in elegance, and the reader sits on either side of this burgeoning relationship, which mixes up that temporal vision with a more immediate, though no less strange, sense of desire.

I’d be hard put not to call this a love story. But the growth of affection between Red and Blue is a gradual thing at the same time that it’s a white-hot furnace. It’s a sense of slowly growing trust, and a willingness from each to protect the other, to try and live up to each other. They’re a strange pair, but the spaces between the words, the hidden truths they don’t dare write down, are an inferno in the minds eye. These are people. Strange, wonderful people, with a passionate intensity that is no longer restricted to the worst. Because they’re such fun to read. The letters between Red and Blue are full of wry observance, of a closeness, an affection which resonates throughout, and feels like the backbone of the text.

The worlds they explore are wonders in their own right. Though we only see snapshots, still there are flashes of the familiar and the strange, to keep us on our toes. And each is vividly, lavishly described, each jump to a new period carries the same depth and heart as the one which came before. The future, or futures, our future (or futures) are there as well, of course. And they are both as wonderful and terrible as one might expect. To read of the dance of Blue and Red is to be swept up in it, to feel their hungers and their fears, to live their careful steps between realities, to understand the craving and the energy which drives them back and forth through time, and away from and toward each other.

This is a novella that is, as you can probably tell, rather difficult to describe. What the authors, fictional and otherwise, have wrought here is an intricate tapestry, or a sparkling jewel of a narrative. Its complicated, passionate, compelling work. It’s a thoughtful, powerful work, which has interesting things to say, and interesting questions to ask – and it does so while telling a fantastic story.  You should read this. If it does nothing else, it will make you feel.

No comments:

Post a Comment