A Space Opera Trojan Horse: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s ‘This Is How You Lose the Time War’
“Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.”
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a book, at least not since Redwall and The Cry of the Icemark and Sabriel in childhood, Wuthering Heights and The Lord of the Rings and The Secret History in teenhood, or more recently The Goldfinch and The Song of Achilles and Circe in adulthood, that has ever felt more quintessentially written for me, from me, like these authors went and dipped their nibs into the deepest darkest depths of my psyche and wantonly dashed me heart and soul across every page.
The magic ingredients…
- The achingly beautiful blend of sweeping space opera and soaring sapphic slow-burn masterfully, mellifluously distilled through the most intimate lens conceivable: the secret correspondence of two agents on opposing sides of an epic interdimensional war spanning untold epochs.
- The grandiose language elevated almost to the point of poetry.
- The stratospheric abandon of its metaphors, each a bridge hewn from agony. As Red writes: “I make metaphors to approach the enormous fact of you on slant.” (Emily Dickinson’s poem no. 1129 as per Faber/Johnson screams to mind here… tell all the truth but tell it slant, otherwise it do be too bright for our infirm delight, like looking at lightning, rather than dazzling gradually, in a way we can comprehend, can bear.)
- The dizzying heights of abstraction flirting most flamboyantly with the demarcation of disbelief…
- The meticulous cast-iron framework of love letters penned in genetic steganography, each preceding the sender’s next POV. Incandescent, inspired, ingenious.
- The sapphics. And their yearning. For it, of course, always comes down to the yearning.
- Even the fact a 19th-century painting is embedded at its heart, itself a steganographical flourish. One of my literal favourite things. Big Goldfinch energy.
- Not only that but this royal saga of sapphics, this sceptred story, this tale of majesty, this vessel of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise… has my all-time favourite variety of temporal paradox: the causality loop. I weep. There are few devices more intricately, more riotously gratifying.
This book is a rhapsody. And thus it utterly unthreaded me.
It’s also about 208 pages, depending on edition. I have precisely 208 highlights. There’s basically more highlighted than unhighlighted text. It stepped on my neck, slapped me in the face, hit me with its time ship, and I thanked it with every blow.
To quote Red, I’m apophenic as a haruspex (an evergreen mood tbh).
“Wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.”
Another subtle but superlative strand to this masterpiece is that there are almost exactly no male characters. Bar named cameos from the likes of Genghis Khan and Caesar, every single side character (almost) is female, be they emperor or waiter.
At its core though is this impossible affinity that blooms like blood on snow between two mortal enemies sworn to atomise each other.
Red is the daughter of the technological dystopia, scion of science, consumed by a hunger she does not know how to sate, tortured (ever since she sought a barren hilltop inspired by Socrates to watch the stars rise in the infancy of her existence) by the awareness of her own solitude. A great, gnawing absence she doesn’t know how to fill.
Until, amidst the pulverised rubble of a blood-soaked battlefield that saw an empire reduced to ash by her calculated temporal surgery, she finds the letter, the one that says: Burn before reading…
So unfurls a grand waltz stepping across millions of years between countless worlds… the impossible, inescapable, unimpeachable truth of fellow time agent and sworn enemy Blue unlocking the need within her, dismantling the mighty dam behind which she has hidden her soul merely to weather the whips and scorns of her isolation. Because Blue, the tumbleweed, the tonic, the obsession planted as a literal seed by the omniscient Garden in a version of 1770 Britain countless lifetimes ago and exiled by suspected enemy infiltration before reintegration as a perplexing pariah, her voracious love of cities and poetry and independence tolerated… is the flood of sweet searing feeling that finally frees Red.
For Red’s fetish, her most private, most fundamental desire, has always been to feel. And for Blue, with the notoriously insatiable appetites that beguiled her entire people, Red is the first thing that has ever been able to sate them.
As Blue writes…
“Hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.”
To which Red replies…
“We sate needs before they strike… But the hunger you describe—that blade jutting from the skin, the weathering as of a hillside often struck by storm, the hollowness—it sounds beautiful and familiar.”
And so Blue hopes that this hunger isn’t a burden to Red just as fiercely as she wants her to be seared by it, longing to sharpen and shape it as much as she yearns to satisfy and sate it.
“But I’ve every confidence in your ability to evade and outmaneuver anyone from my side. Anyone who isn’t me.”
“Fuck safety. Fuck the shadow. Red knows hunger now.”
Despite the unprecedented diligence of their secrecy, however, a shadow clings to every missive…
Thus this book is also something of a psychological thriller, or more specifically a murder mystery.
“Red sits still for hours. Night falls. Wind rustles ferns. An apatosaur lumbers past, ruffling its feathers. She lets herself feel. The organs that buffer her emotions from physical response shut down, and all she’s hidden washes over her. Her heart quakes. She heaves in gulps of breath, and she is so alone.”
It also constantly put me in mind of truly one of the greatest scifi stories ever penned – Star Trek Voyager’s notorious two-parter ‘The Year of Hell’, in which the crew contends with the apocalyptic threat of the time-editing Krenim Imperium. Only here, we’re seeing what the universe would look like if the Krenim had an opponent of equal power and ability spawned from ecological utopia, and two riotously sapphic time agents fell in love with the words they wove for each other through the debris.
There are similarly delicious Doctor Who vibes (both authors being self-confessed stans, and leaning into any titular associations with abandon, pushing Davies’s boldest timey-wimiest concepts into a scintillating stratosphere thanks to being unencumbered by BBC bosses or budgets and revelling in the potential energy of their form in the same way GRRM did after transitioning from penning scripts to novels). It’s like Interstellar meets Killing Eve on steroids.
As a side note, it’s also interesting (and iconic) that Britain is referred to by both the Agency and Garden as Albion, even historically, so Red refers to cutting herself out of the air onto “a shit-stinking muddy street in some upthread Albion, unwarmed by weak sun in a sky the colour of whey”, implying Great Britain/the United Kingdom ceases to exist as a political entity en masse at some blessed point in this universe’s myriad futures, Albion perhaps being the name of the island or the historical entity after all its components fractured into independent nations. Alba gu bràth.
Further fired into the bedrock of this story is a visceral awareness of the vast, inscrutable, inconceivable weight of words — why Red comments that poets are the most dangerous chisels on history.
“Even we who fight wars through time forget the value of a word in the right moment, a rattle in the right car engine, a nail in the right horseshoe . . . It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.”
“But Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.”
“I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet. I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No—I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you.”
“Something true, or nothing at all.”
“What is this, but a small mind’s deluded fantasy? What is this, but clutching straws against death and time? What is love, ever, but…”
Have I ever been more devastated that a story is over?
PLEASE UNIVERSE LET US HAVE THE TV SHOW. It’s optioned and both authors are script-writing and executive-producing. I’m thinking either newcomers, or ageless goddesses like Lucy Liu as Red and T’Nia Miller as Blue for the main cast, with the curtain rising on the latter in 1770s rural Scotland, slowly succumbing to a violent illness, abandoned and exiled by her people, until she seemingly miraculously survives it and emerges as super agent, anointed and isolated by her resurrection, embarking on a glittering military career criss-crossing multi-dimensional millennia, before she becomes aware of someone of almost equal skill and ambition on the other side of the war, someone she leaves a letter for by the smoking wreckage of a gunship at one world’s end. That sun-soaked hill where she met her first test would be revisited in the final episode in a kind of Game of Thrones Season 6 episode 10-style revelatory crescendo… Score by Pinar Toprak or Segun Akinola or Tokio Myers or Max Richter (á la On the Nature of Daylight).
In short, this book… I did not want it to end.
“All good stories travel from the outside in.”
This one burrows into your skin, your cells, your soul.
And will stay there forever.
Till all the seas gang dry.
“No more of this. That I should die—fine. I signed on to this war to die. I don’t know if I ever told you that before. But that you should die. That you should suffer. That they should unmake you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.”
