COMMENTARY: This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
- it’s gimmicky and i usually like playing on structure and narrative like this. But this isn’t working for me. The characters are both cool and unflappable, neither has much vulnerability nor flaws that I can dig into, all they are is that they’re both hyper-creative in how they deliver messages to each other. I dunno. There just isn’t much plot nor arc progress and I’m on page 74. Nothing’s happening except they’re out-clevering each other.
- there’s so much telling and show offy variations on a theme.
- The world building just feels so slipshod too. Red is like a robot but has a husband and has had sex. Blue is part of this organic mass consciousness and can embed herself into matter? It’s just not explained or hinted at very well.
- I’m also getting tired of the poetic prose that goes nowhere, had no stakes I can feel. Logically I know they’re risking their lives by messaging an enemy, but I don’t know what the consequences are. And if it’s a court martial or death, I don’t really care about them either. It’s just pretty show-offy prose. It’s a distraction from the fact that the actual story underneath lacks genuine emotional substance