This is How You Lose the Time War

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an epistolary romance novel(la) between opposing time-travel agents. The premise is cute, a little dashed-off letter here, a twist in time there, and it builds to an entirely forseeable end, which was the most surprising thing about the book.

It had some nice turns of phrase --- "apophenic as a haruspex" is truly outstanding (p. 100) --- and plays out a budding relationship nicely, albeit with a flourish only available to truly ridiculous time-travel narratives. The summary "I love cities, To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am." (p. 87) resonated with how calm and happy I feel in some city-crowd situations. And the silly-serious "I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you." (p. 113) is definitely a feeling I've had, and shared with others, before; it's a nice summary of how it feels to think theory-of-mind thoughts.

Overall, though, the book was not nearly as twisty timey-wimey as I expected. There were certain conclusions that seemed pretty obvious to me, and were delivered as if revelatory. But it's a cute, brief read, and reading fictional characters assigning each other a beloved book and then discussing it has added that book to my list. Plus there were several literary references I appreciated, and others I was sent scurrying to reference material for. And I always appreciate a book that forces me to perform outside study.


This post's theme word is apophenic (adj), "perceiving or believing in connections and meaningful patterns among unrelated phenomena." "I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery..." (p. 100)

Empress of Forever

Empress of Forever is Max Gladstone's doorstop-sized foray into science fiction. It tells the story of Vivian Lao, a tech CEO/brilliant executive coordinator-and-person-reader, who is trying to use her wits to make things better for the people around her (and, ultimately, all people everywhere: "for the liberation of all sentient beings." p. 982 in the novel & p. 1041 in the acknowledgements). This opening of philosophy --- "wealth was the only real freedom left. Get money and you could do what you wanted, help your friends, pile cash and power as a wall against the world." (p.7) --- is one I read a lot of in certain online circles, and it seems both relevant to modern discourse and incredibly depressing. It's clear why Gladstone chose this as the starting point, not the conclusion, of the story.

This book, however, is trying not to be depressing. The first chapter reads like the climactic chapter of a William Gibson novel (action-suspense-technology gizmos); the second chapter reads like Philip K. Dick (surreal-trippy-helpless in the face of a powerful incomprehensible system). Thereafter, it goes a bit more on the rails, and sticks to an optimistic tone which alternates between joyous nonsense wordplay (describing fractalline spaceships as "whirling furious Mandelcontinents of Pride set against a regimented vast and glistening phalanx", p. 168) and serious well-adjusted grown-ups dealing with feelings and relationships; overall the theme of the book emerges as:

Viv was used to this split-heart feeling. Most of the time the calculative half bubbled out, seizing control. The interpersonal details, your own emotional well-being or your friends', could wait until after you figured out how to solve the problem at hand. (p. 916)

This resonates for me with all sorts of writing around rationalism, adulthood, science, and community-building. (See for example this post, selected arbitrarily from what I read around the same time as this book.) There is a certain philosophical, a-little-bit-cold approach to being a functioning social person, which hits a lot of familiar notes for the educated-techie-rationalist set; even some of the book's one-liner jokes are in this zone: "the human mind had assembled itself haphazard from spare parts meant for something else." (p. 750)

Overall I thought this book was fine, but a bit overlong (how many times will we cycle through "the team was split up, everyone was sad, then someone had a realization that friendship and caring and communication are the solution, then they miraculously get out of a bind!"?), and it didn't hit that magical sweet spot of Three Parts Dead, which had BOTH a protagonist I identified with (as did this book), AND a really cool mechanic/worldbuilding/storytelling aspect. This one felt more plodding, and the long-building climax felt less climactic, for all that it tried, with strenuous adjectives, to stress how incredibly important and galaxy-spanning the repercussions would be.


This post's theme word is circumvallate (v tr), "to surround by a defensive structure, such as a rampart" and fuligin (n), "dark". The hyperspace circumvallations were a bit strange. "Vantablack statues looked like this in person. Fuligin, but green. The light that came off her throbbed." (p. 54)