Staff Pick: This is How You Lose the Time War

In the eternal Time War, Red and Blue are agents of rival factions, the two sides of a conflict that stretches from an immemorial beginning, forward to an unknowable future, and across every version of every universe. In service of “the Agency,” a techno-utopian hive mind, Red is the best at her job, making and unmaking events across time and space to cement Agency’s dominance. Opposing the Agency is “Garden,” a vast organic consciousness for whom Blue specializes in playing the long game as she plants seeds and lays careful groundwork for Garden’s victory. One taunting letter marked “Burn before reading,” launches a correspondence between the agents that threatens to change not just Red and Blue, but the fabric of the Time War, itself.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Glastone is a sapphic triumph of speculative fiction. Part third person narrative and part epistolary, the novella’s innovative structure allows both authors to shine. Each chapter focuses on one agent, with Gladstone penning Red’s chapters and El-Mohtar providing Blue’s. The result is an impressively cohesive and compelling love story between two characters who feel at once impossibly alien and undeniably human.

It is this humanity—a desire for connection, for understanding, for freedom—that forms the novella’s heart, and it is this humanity that El-Mohtar and Gladstone artfully center throughout the text. The details of the world in which Red and Blue reside (and indeed the exact mechanics of the titular Time War) are left intentionally vague, leaving space for readers to connect with the complicated interpersonal and intrapersonal struggles Red and Blue face. The universe feels just real enough to ground the action without distracting from the novella’s emotional core.

If you are looking for specificity in worldbuilding or a “hard magic system” in your science fiction novels, this one may not be for you. However, if you are willing to step into the unknown, This is How You Lose the Time War will reward you with a moving and emotionally resonant story that is bound to stand the test of time.