This Cyber-Organic Techno-Naturalist Rivals-Turned-Lovers Gender and Time Non-Conforming High-Concept and Abstract Sci-Fi Romance Novella Rules. There's Your Title.

“The twist of you in me. The writhe. You’re a whip uncoiling in my veins, and I write between the rearing and the snap.”

Amal El Mohtar’s and Max Gladstone's Award-Winning(Hugo, Nebula, and Locust) Science-Fiction novella answers the question: “What if you made Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ into a Romance/Spy Thriller and it was good?”

Coprotagonists “Red,” and “Blue” are gender-non-conforming sapphically-coded cyber-techno-organic shapeshifting warrior-spies in a time-traveling/reality-bending conflict bordering on comprehension. Red, a member of a techno-futuristic civilization with a ruthless and despotic commander in “The Commandant”, and, Blue, an agent for “The Garden,” an identity-flattening collective-consciousness that “blooms” forces for temporary deployment against the forces of the Commandant are our co-protagonists. The forces they serve, this “Garden” and “Commandant” curate and fight their battles for the control of all of time and reality across all imaginable universes along various worlds and time-streams or “strands,” with highlights including alternate 19th century steampunk Londons, Atlantises, and several fascinating others. Paragraphs span centuries and lifetimes. In other paragraphs, moving the right branch on a tree at the right time changes time-streams for one war effort. Time, both its place and meaning, are simultaneously stripped away and amplified as the conflict and passion between Red and Blue play out.

Red and Blue begin the novel as bitter enemies, with a taut spy vs. spy feud/dynamic that persists for half of the novella before that feud inevitably results in the questioning of the ideals and beliefs they have been specifically tailor-designed and raised to serve. A powerful metaphor for queerness and the claiming of one’s own identity, “This is How You Lose The Time War” unfolds in a series of letters between these two rivals. The prose is delicate and precise, oftentimes waxing sharply poetic. I found myself rereading so many passages several times, struck by their intensity, passion, and beauty.

“You would find me in an instant, crush me faster—I’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light I tried to step.”

“I dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves.”

I rarely enjoy novellas so much. To quote The Bard, "Brevity is the soul of wit." For a book so brief, it’s shining in that regard.

-A+