This Is How You Lose the Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstonescience fiction time travel romance
Reviewed on: 16th April 2025.
Reading “This Is How You Lose the Time War” has been a deeply frustrating experience, aggravated by the fact I found the premise to be intriguing and full of wasted potential.
A thought experiment comes to mind. Call yourself Theseus, take this book, and treat it like a ship. One by one, take its settings, the descriptions, the words and ideas exchanged by the characters, and swap each for random replacements that match in terms of “vibes”, but nothing even remotely more concrete that vibes. Would you be left with the same book? I can only imagine one answer: yes; and that is the fundamental issue. If you have a book and you can replace it bit by bit with random stuff to just get fundamentally the same book as a result, I dare say you never had a book in your hands to begin with. You just replaced one word salad for another.
Naturally, there will be readers out there who disagree; who can take a book like this and find some meaning in it. I know that to be true, as a matter of fact. Still, I simply cannot relate.