This Is How You Lose the Time War

Livre relié, 201 pages

Langue : English

Publié 16 juillet 2019 par Simon and Schuster.

ISBN :
978-1-5344-3100-3
ISBN copié !

Voir sur OpenLibrary

4 étoiles (22 critiques)

Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

In the ashes of a dying world, Red finds a letter marked “Burn before reading. Signed, Blue.”

So begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents in a war that stretches through the vast reaches of time and space.

Red belongs to the Agency, a post-singularity technotopia. Blue belongs to Garden, a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter. Their pasts are bloody and their futures mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common—save that they’re the best, and they’re alone.

Now what began as a battlefield boast grows into a dangerous game, one both Red and Blue are determined to win. Because winning’s what you do in war. Isn’t it?

A tour de force collaboration from …

5 éditions

Either too short, or too long.

Aucune note

I can't decide if this would have worked better (for me) as a short story, or a full length book. If it was longer, it could have expanded on it's ideas. If it had been shorter, it wouldn't have felt so repetetive.

There is some good ideas here, but they deserve better than being hand waved away. How do Red and Blue target their letters to each other across strands of time? If there are certain contested junctures in time, shouldn't they be swarmed with agents, and multiple aspects of the same agents? If the protagonists are just cogs in two massive opposing machines battling for supremacy over all time - why does it seems like they are the only two operators in the field?

I'm not saying this is a bad book, there is a lot good writing here. But it didn't work for me. Two highly subjective stars. …

a publié une critique de This Is How You Lose the Time War par Amal El-Mohtar

a teapot in a tempest

5 étoiles

"This is How You Lose the Time War" asks the reader to perch on the shoulders of two operatives on opposing sides of a time-traveling war.

Each chapter follows "Red" or "Blue" as they scurry up and down timelines and across dimensions. The book is both sweepingly broad and extremely contained and personal.

The settings flit by, dizzying: a temple for mechanized humans, an ancient holy cave, the assassination of Caesar - each sketched with broad, emotional strokes to give the setting an aesthetic. One gets the sense that a great web of cause and effect is being constantly constructed, altered, and destroyed, without ever seeing the full picture.

Against these backdrops, the characters "Red" and "Blue" write to each other - as nemeses, then as friends, ever deeper entangled even as they demolish each other's plans and forces. The letters make up an enormous part of the experience, and …

Review of 'This Is How You Lose the Time War' on 'Goodreads'

5 étoiles

I've had this sitting on my Kindle for a while, but I'm glad I waited in a way as it was the perfect choice for my last book of the year. Somewhere between a simple love story (but see Blue's thoughts on Romeo and Juliet) and the saving of the entire universe, it fits so much in such a small space and creates so many thoughts and images. A wonderful book, heartily recommended.

This Is How You Lose The Time War

5 étoiles

The first quarter reminded me of Doomsday Book and One Day All This Will Be Yours, and the last quarter reminded me of that Iain M. Banks book (I won't say which one because it would spoil either this or that if you haven't read both, but go read Culture (except for Consider Phlebas)).

The prose was everything I've come to expect from Max Gladstone, and now I'll have to try something else by El-Mohtar.

Not for everyone...

5 étoiles

... or to be honest most people, but I really liked it. I took it SLOW though, finishing it in about twice my average pace, i believe... which allowed me to really enjoy the beautiful poetic nature of the book and really rather incredible writing. And then i read it again... and possibly enjoyed it more? that's not happened before ._.

probably not for everyone, but it's very good

5 étoiles

it's a magical realist (?) romance in a science fiction Time War setting, an unusual choice, but one that works well, given how strange the consequences of warping causality would be. If you can get ahold of the audio book, it's pretty good, has different readers for Blue and Red.

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