Roundtable: This is How You Lose the Time War
Words by Harvey Weir
Harvey examines their deep dive with Kaz and Jason into what makes the novella tick.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is a collaborative novella published in 2019, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. It depicts the interstellar, time-travelling rivalry of Red and Blue, two elite warriors bound to opposite factions; Red to the Agency, Blue to Garden.
In the burning wake of a far-future battlefield, we first meet Red, surveying the carnage, mechanically augmented hands wet with blood. She finds a letter, a taunt from Blue, who Red is aware of, but has never met. What follows is a dance of chasing shadows, each character working to unravel the other’s efforts, pursuing each other across time and multiverses, all the while leaving letters to gloat at the other’s failure. Red and Blue slowly shift each other’s intentions through simple communication: their curiosity at finally finding another being like them, one who can operate to their level, proves to be a singularly important experience. As a reader, we notice these characters are unlikely to stay true rivals for very long. Once their burgeoning interest is acknowledged by the deuteragonists, the novella shifts gears, and becomes a tense thriller where our secret lovers must hide their connection from their respective factions, all the while leaving each other letters in more inventive and sensual ways. Red is forced to poison a letter to Blue by her own superiors, Blue eats it and ‘dies’; Red, on the cusp of her own death, discovers a sliver of a chance to save her Blue. She infiltrates Blue’s homeworld of Garden to infect infantile Blue with just enough of herself to disrupt the poison. The story culminates with a commitment, yet an uncertainty: Red is captured by her own, the Agency, the game finally up. In the final letter, Blue gives her a five-minute window to break out, and promises that together, “this is how we win”.
This essay is intended as a writer’s aid, and a companion piece to our podcast episode, where myself and guest speakers Kaz and Jason explore what makes Time War so refreshing in the current landscape of speculative fiction.
This Is How You Lose the Time War occupies a unique space in contemporary science fiction by balancing four weighty pillars with nimble ease. The first of these pillars is:
Melodrama
Melodrama, as described by Kaz in our episode, is ‘the naturalism of the dream life’. Kaz identifies elements of the melodramatic mode in the use of the fantastical—stakes, worlds, plots—in speculative fiction. For them, this speculative melodrama does not intend realism of action and event, but realism of emotion—less about what happens, more about how it makes you feel. A character in a melodrama may express their love for another not by sending flowers or asking them to dinner, but by professing a desire for marriage while simultaneously challenging their other suitor to a duel to the death. We do not end our breakups with mutual suicide (hopefully), but the emotion in Romeo and Juliet is still palpable—still true.
When I engage with fantasy and sci-fi, despite its supernatural settings and epic, often universe-shattering stakes, I tend not to interact with it in the same way I do melodrama. The extremely heightened emotions attached to a chosen one fighting against the forces of evil to save the universe, actually match the stakes with the scale of events. When characters scream and cry and swear on the blood of their ancestors, I often read it as a strange kind of realism—this is how you should react in situations of mortal intergalactic peril.
This is, crucially, not the case for everyone, and neither is the case for me all the time. I interact with some speculative fiction more directly as metaphor, bringing it closer to melodrama—leaning into the story’s emotional truth as a reflection of my own. So do many other people. But I often am an enjoyer of verisimilitude, so I often prefer to engage with the stakes of speculative stories as if they did indeed exist in some far corner of the galaxy, rather than as if they were merely metaphors or melodramatic extensions of the existing world.
In Time War, this multiversal, self-fulfilling-paradox of a novella about eternal war, you might expect moments of extreme emotion to take on a certain flavour. My expectations during the first chapter or so were pretty much identical to what I’d expect from another heartfelt, time-hopping story: Doctor Who.
“I would rather break the world
than lose you.”
The most heightened emotions in Time War come from considered, small moments, such as when Red and Blue discover each other’s joy in eating. The mutual recognition of as simple a pleasure as taste, decoupled entirely from a need for nourishment, is one of the most profoundly impacting moments in the book. Other moments include, as beautifully highlighted by Kaz in our discussion, the moment where Blue eats the poisoned letter concocted by Red’s superiors to neutralise her, for good: committing to her love for Red by literally eating her message of death, in which Red has encased another letter, burdened with the knowledge that Blue is far too curious and committed to her to avoid eating even the most obvious of honeytraps. The physical act of consuming another’s thoughts and feelings is a running theme throughout the book, and the symbolic act of cannibalism reflects the burning love felt between the characters, to the point that even after Red cautions Blue not to eat the next letter, Red hides a message within it anyway, knowing Blue’s consumption of it—of her words, of her—is a foregone conclusion—only to find that in the end, Red was within Blue’s flesh long before the first letter was eaten. The points of highest emotion come from the characters’ interactions with the grand scale of the plot—the love story reflected in the sinking of Atlantis, in the burnt-out carcasses of spaceships, in the living and dying of entire universes. Blue eating the poisoned berries is love personified by death, the essence of melodrama.
Romance through Worldbuilding
The second pillar of Time War is in deep conversation with the first; the way the worldbuilding is intertwined with the central love story. It’s one of the best-realised science fiction settings put to page. The worldbuilding is absolutely crucial to this book, and the way it interacts with the story is singular, and brilliant.
We are introduced almost immediately to the setting’s central conceit: a conflict stretching across time and multiple universes, between two opposing factions that each use the inhabitants and technologies of whatever time and place they land in to fight battles both physical and temporal. It takes barely two chapters to understand the setting’s simple elegance: a combination of the butterfly effect and the grandfather paradox, agents altering history in often-minute ways to grant their side meaningful advantages centuries down the line. It’s this duelling, not of direct violence between agents, but of long, slow, subtle manipulations of the worlds underfoot, that leads to the indescribable tension between the main characters. Rather than a verbal conversation or a physical confrontation, Red and Blue meet and learn of each other through letters left in each other’s wake. They fall just as much in love with the actions, choices, and skills of their rival as they do their words.
This temporal game of Go leads to some of the most melodramatic and poetic expressions of first interest, then curiosity, then compassion, then love. Red toils in Genghis Khan’s deforesting crews for over a decade, only to discover a letter left in the rings of a tree that took more than a century to write. She imagines Blue flitting to the same tree once a year, every year for a hundred years, appearing to the locals as some form of nature spirit or goddess, fleeting and unverifiable. Consider the patience Blue held to write such a letter; it’s this kind of devotion that is unique to the world constructed by Time War’s authors.
This mode of communication—ironically the same technique used in the first half of the book to attempt to foil each other’s war efforts—culminates perfectly, the temporal cascade of actions leading to actions leading to actions, leading Red to take a forgone conclusion in Blue’s backstory and make it her own action. She invades Garden and imprints herself onto Blue to save her against Red’s own future-past poison, the ultimate realisation of the world’s central concept. The temporal cascade becomes interwoven to the point of paradox, to the point of inevitability. To the point of destiny.
Don’t let all this poetic resonance distract you from the facts: this world is meticulously constructed! The descriptions of the multiversal locations, from their smallest details to their most dramatic revelations (Atlantis sinking comes to mind) are simultaneously refreshing and referential to humanity’s canon of literature and history. The mechanics of these far-future beings are left largely unexplored, but those provided are detailed, consistent, and compelling. This world is in itself a technical marvel of construction, more detailed and evocative in 200 pages than many science fiction texts triple its length.
“Love is what we have,
against time and death.”
Flirting When You've Never Spoken to Another Member of Your Species
The third pillar is probably also my favourite. Red and Blue are not the only members of their respective factions, each connected in their own unique way to thousands of other consciousnesses, individuals, people. But what they find in each other is a similarity that faction-of-origin cannot compete with; for the first time, they’ve met someone their equal. Not only an equal in war and manipulation, but in curiosity, in intellect, in appetite.
It is with Blue, not with other members of the Agency, that Red discovers a mutual appreciation for taste. It is with Red, not with other inhabitants of Garden, that Blue is able to reference ancient literature and joke about meeting historical figures. It is with each other that Red and Blue can joke about postscripts and poison, about whacked seals, about knowing Socrates.
In the words of Blue herself:
I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self… is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away. This is a necessary part of any ecosystem, but it unsettles others, this inability to be satisfied. It is difficult—it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way.
It’s this connection that makes Red and Blue one species. It is this that makes their connection such a compelling, freshly-fashioned thing: they have literally never had these conversations before.
Not to beat the melodrum once more, but this is a prime example of melodrama at work: the novelty of natural chemistry, of finding someone you can converse more naturally with, someone who understands your drives and desires implicitly like nobody has before, is stretched to the point of extreme literality. They have never encountered another entity with their approach to the world. Of course they fall in love.
But it’s a clumsy, awkward, frosty beginning. At first bound by intentions—and then pretences—of rivalry, they don’t know how to open up to each other. They don’t know how to admit what they feel—Blue is less concerned with the prospect of being poisoned by Red, than she is with the potential she may feel something for her opposition.
A lot can be read into this novelty contained between their burgeoning romances; you can approach it through a queer lens, or as a metaphor for two neurodivergents finding each other in a sea of neurotypical conversation and connection, or simply as a first proper love. I enjoy all of these readings for the same reason: it speaks to a lowering of pretence, an abandoning of etiquette and norms in favour of being open and bare to the preferences of your interlocutor. Red cannot talk to Blue the way she talks to Commandant; Blue cannot relate to Red in the way she relates to others of Garden. They are required to abandon their societal conditioning and have their conversation exist only in reference to each other, which threatens them both at first, but quickly becomes a solace—and when the solace arrives, it arrives in waves so melodramatic they may as well be tsunamis.
I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.
I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.
Love,
Red.
In their flirtations are hidden the secret ingredient that ensures the melodrama doesn’t become taxing or excessive: humour. Similarly to Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet got mentioned both in Time War itself, and in our conversation about it—there are perfect respites from the high drama with well-placed puns, double entendres, or just downright silliness. From a craft perspective, the authors did a phenomenal job ensuring their readers’ palates are always cleansed, their tolerance for the melodramatic always buoyed by a giggle or a cackle to relieve the tension. It’s this that elevates Time War for me—a decision to have the characters only take themselves as seriously as they reasonably can. They joke when they want to joke. They prank when they want to prank. It’s this that all authors—and especially authors of speculative fiction—would benefit best to learn. Humour isn’t just for comedies. Humour is human, and it’s everywhere, even in the most (melo)dramatic of tales.
Blue remarks that Romeo and Juliet is a comedy in some universes, a tragedy in others. She sits to watch a performance, but walks out before she can know the ending. We’re subjected to a similar thing; Time War almost seems to end in the beginning of the third act, leaving us guessing as to the success of their rebellion. Will it be a tragedy in this universe?
Surveillance & Loneliness/Isolation
This final pillar threads itself into the other three so harmoniously that my chosen metaphor is starting to fold in on itself; they’re not pillars, they’re 4 colours of string interwoven into a beautiful novel.
Surveillance is, on its face, the antithesis of isolation: in Red’s world, everyone is connected all the time. Every piece of information is—or should be—uploaded directly to the Agency’s network, every breath drawn and step taken and seal whacked part of a database accessible to all. Similarly, the lives of Blue and her fellows in Garden are interwoven, grown in concert so tightly that “we belong to one another in a way that obliterates the term. We sink and swell and bud and bloom together; we infuse Garden; Garden spreads through us.”
Red and Blue’s lives are so rife with this connection that to be severed for even a moment burns the event into their memories like a brand; each of them had a moment of being truly alone, and each relates it to the other as a deeply held secret, a powerfully formative experience. These moments of isolation shape Red and Blue into the people they are when they “first” encounter each other: hungry for what they do not understand.
It’s a fairly easy link to draw between their story—their curiosity born from being alone, disconnected, leading to a new type of connection forged between two people in defiance of the established surveilling societies they originate from, culminating in a decision to leave those societies behind and commit to each other—and our current world of interconnected internet conversations. The metaphor writes itself: they got their spark from being disconnected (offline), they dislike being surveilled (having every preference and conversation tracked by an algorithm designed to turn you into its product), they connect with another person who shares their preferences (meeting someone offline), and they fulfil their burgeoning relationship by abandoning the world of surveillance and allying with each other (putting down your phone, going outside, focusing on ‘what matters’). It writes itself so easily, that I’m not going to spend much time on it. This phenomenon has been covered to death by pop psychologists to red-pill influencers to high school teachers.
Instead, I want to talk about the effect surveillance has on Red and Blue—and what that means for us. It’s nigh-impossible for either of the characters to experience something wholly to themselves; to do so they must perfectly deceive those who taught them to lie in the first place.
This monumental pressure breeds a connection between them that, while beautiful, is fraught. Their moments are shared only in the shadows of shadows, walking not side by side, but chasing the fossils of footprints. And, ironically, Red and Blue were both deeply lonely before encountering each other, so much so that without their exposure to isolation, they would not have realised their loneliness, so accustomed to it they were.
This isolation—lonely in a crowd—is something many of us feel these days. Not just in the classically discussed experience of opening Instagram and experiencing envy and depression at the thousands of people living seemingly better lives than us. This isolation is most corrosive when we aren’t aware of it, when it’s leading us into communities where disagreement is an expression of moral failing.
We isolate ourselves in echo chambers, in little subcommunities that seem to be unaware of the other types of people that exist in the world—or refuse to acknowledge their complex humanity if they are. Red and Blue are committed to their opposition, to the moral superiority of their faction, until they start to really talk to each other.
It’s their connection that broadens their horizons, and it’s treading broadened horizons that strengthens their connection.
“I love you. I will write it in waves in the skies.”
What Can We Learn?
Writing is hard. Writing well is harder. Writing, contrary to what Tumblr blogs and video essays (and essays like this one) try to tell you, cannot be solved by learning tricks, copying down tips, or even through study of the masters. It can be aided through these methods, but the solution only comes when you write from yourself. In my last essay on Flowers For Algernon, I waxed at length about author Daniel Keyes’ commitment to realism; researching the psychology topics and techniques he wanted to use, basing characters off people he knew, grounding all of his writing in reality. His approach is one way to write what you know: know, then write.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is completely different. There’s no discrete psychological phenomena to research, and the key characters are not the type to be easily based on present-day humans. But the text is still an example of writing what you know: each of the authors wrote their character’s letters without knowing what would be in the other, facilitating genuine surprise and wonder at their counterpart’s words. The conversation is real, even if its context is not realistic.
In the end, it all comes back to melodrama—you may not “know” events, characters, themes from science fiction and fantasy in the same way you can “know” books heavily grounded in realism by walking down your main street and arguing with your family at Christmas. But you do know the way you want stories to make you feel; you know the type of art you want to put out into the world. Write what you know, whether it’s real or not, because at the end of the day, everything is.