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Red and Blue belong to warring factions which, far in the future, are constantly sending agents back in time to change history so it will put one of those factions ahead. Each is the best at what she does. But even though they come from very different homes — one a cybernetic kind of hive and the other an organic, Earth-based collective — and are sworn enemies throughout millennia, each understands the feeling of isolation and aloneness the other experiences.
Blue starts by sending Red a coded message, and Red responds. A friendship blooms, one that’s forbidden, that they must take incredible pains to hide. As they reveal their whole selves to each other over the years, as they work as they have been raised to do to defeat the other’s side, they realize their feelings. But even as their sides fight for the future, Red and Blue can have no future together. Or can they?
This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novella of friendship and love, of two post-human people going about their lives fighting and killing and doing what they’re told. The book consists mostly of their letters, framed briefly by the work they are doing in villages and cities throughout time, around the world, in familiar situations or those twisted in alternate timelines. The agents’ letters disclose some details about their realities, about the way they were created and bred and trained, and a bit about what they do, but the book doesn’t explore the settings and workings of Garden and the Agency or at all about how they evolve in different timelines. There is little exposition or world-building. The letters and the relationship of these two operatives are the focus of the story.
Because of this, and because their lives are so perfunctory — as they freely tell each other — simply killing and working over and over to defeat the other side and preserve their own side’s timeline, for probably a third to a half of the book I simply wasn’t invested in them or the story. But as they became closer and more open with each other, they became more human and more intriguing, and their plight more compelling. By the last third, I wondered how their story would end, if it would be tragedy or comedy, as one mention in the book references Shakespeare in alternate realities. And since it is a story of time travel, then it became clear there would be the potential for some bending accomplished through time and even some Russian-nesting-doll machinations.
I ended up enjoying and appreciating the book and its loveliness and the pull of two people who come to love each other even in the worst of circumstances, against the most challenging odds. It’s science fiction, it’s poetry in epistolary form — it’s a neat mixture of genres and styles that just has to be experienced rather than explained.
Rated: Moderate, for five instances of strong language and fewer than ten uses of mild and moderate language. Sexual references are limited to characters saying they have had sex. References to violence are reasonably frequent and include some blood and plenty of instances of killing but are very brief and mostly asides about the characters’ “jobs” of killing to change the course of time and history.
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