This Is How You Lose the Time War
May. 31st, 2019 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaThis Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This book is made of words.
Depending on your preferred flavor of literalism, I imagine you are now protesting either, "But so is every book," or, "Strictly speaking, this book is made of 1s and 0s encoded in the circuits of your phone." I mean something specific by my claim, though: certain sound-focused writers, especially science fiction poets (Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Yoon Ha Lee sometimes) pile word on coruscating word, glistering. If you're an image-focused reader like me, the effect can be almost too much: each word is its own picture, layered, overbalancing. I worried about that effect, approaching This Is How You Lose the Time War: would I be overwhelmed? Certainly this is a book focused on individual words and associated separate images--agents braid time and dance through it, and you never quite learn how or wherefore, the process is the point--but I had underestimated the sheer exuberant fun of it. This Is How You Lose the Time War is an accurate title: it's a dare, from one agent in that time war to another.
It took me a little while to settle into reading, in large part because I was trying to sort out the differences between the two characters: one woman is named Red and the other Blue, and about half the book is letters from Red to Blue about what Blue might be doing or vice versa, so it's easy to coast along in ambiguity. I eventually--more slowly than might seem warranted--arrived at the mnemonic that blue is like green and Blue is from the Garden future, where everything is more or less a growing plant. Meanwhile, Red is from a future of machines and artificially enhanced intelligences.
Red's first letters to Blue are aggressively silly (timey-wimey something something). The book's first shift in tone involves a ridiculous, over-the-top, embodied pun. I was hooked in around that point, the moment that Red and Blue shift from writing to each other as enemies to writing as rivals who might understand one another. The story shifts again after Red's superior, the Commandant, realizes that an agent from the other faction has taken an interest in her, and shifts once more as Red reacts to Blue's reaction. Somewhere in there I started sending my friends messages consisting entirely of exclamation marks.
The ending is complete unto itself: the promise of a love story and the promise of a universes-spanning, time-spanning rivalry, woven in together.
(This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.)
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This book is made of words.
Depending on your preferred flavor of literalism, I imagine you are now protesting either, "But so is every book," or, "Strictly speaking, this book is made of 1s and 0s encoded in the circuits of your phone." I mean something specific by my claim, though: certain sound-focused writers, especially science fiction poets (Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Yoon Ha Lee sometimes) pile word on coruscating word, glistering. If you're an image-focused reader like me, the effect can be almost too much: each word is its own picture, layered, overbalancing. I worried about that effect, approaching This Is How You Lose the Time War: would I be overwhelmed? Certainly this is a book focused on individual words and associated separate images--agents braid time and dance through it, and you never quite learn how or wherefore, the process is the point--but I had underestimated the sheer exuberant fun of it. This Is How You Lose the Time War is an accurate title: it's a dare, from one agent in that time war to another.
It took me a little while to settle into reading, in large part because I was trying to sort out the differences between the two characters: one woman is named Red and the other Blue, and about half the book is letters from Red to Blue about what Blue might be doing or vice versa, so it's easy to coast along in ambiguity. I eventually--more slowly than might seem warranted--arrived at the mnemonic that blue is like green and Blue is from the Garden future, where everything is more or less a growing plant. Meanwhile, Red is from a future of machines and artificially enhanced intelligences.
Red's first letters to Blue are aggressively silly (timey-wimey something something). The book's first shift in tone involves a ridiculous, over-the-top, embodied pun. I was hooked in around that point, the moment that Red and Blue shift from writing to each other as enemies to writing as rivals who might understand one another. The story shifts again after Red's superior, the Commandant, realizes that an agent from the other faction has taken an interest in her, and shifts once more as Red reacts to Blue's reaction. Somewhere in there I started sending my friends messages consisting entirely of exclamation marks.
The ending is complete unto itself: the promise of a love story and the promise of a universes-spanning, time-spanning rivalry, woven in together.
(This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-01 02:27 pm (UTC)