This Is How You Lose the Time War

By Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a science-fiction novella about two rival agents, Red and Blue, on opposite sides of a vast war fought across timelines, places, and possible futures. As they chase each other through collapsing civilizations and rewritten histories, they begin leaving taunts, then letters, hidden in increasingly impossible places. Each character in the novella, red and blue, are written exclusively by Amal and Max in creative and exciting prose.

Long after I read the last word, I still think about this story. Even with the setting and characters taking place so far from our known reality in both time and place, even when the main characters are by no means “human”, the story and connection unfolds into something truly intimate and profound and human. With every correspondence between Red and Blue, a charged rivalry drips into a deep love but carefully placed within poetic fragments found through space and time. The exchange captured such an honest intimacy with characters that for the most part are never physically in the same place.

The world building, missions, danger, and deep emotions all came together in what is at its core a love story.

Let’s not forget this is a queer story and I think the letter writing format does a great service to that point. Perhaps one of the reasons so much of this book resonated with me is because its progression and intensity in terms of how the romance progressed was sapphic at heart.

But let’s address that while the story itself does feel very sapphic, and I think mainly the way we associate deep longing and poetic prose to feel sapphic, half of this book is written by Max Gladwell who is a straight man and has in September 2025 retracted his support for trans athletes (https://www.them.us/story/malcolm-gladwell-trans-athletes-sports). Does this make us feel conflicted that a queer story is 50% written by a straight man that has most recently changed course on his allyship?

I think this generally brings into conversation something to explore more in-depth at a later date with regards to who is allowed to write stories about marginalized communities? Can a straight man profit off a novella marketed as a queer story? A white woman write a a novel about Mexican migrants? It’s the position of Soft Cover that we should be including the author in the conversation when we critically think about the stories we are reading and books we are buying.

While this book has gotten a lot of praise, there are some reviews out there that have some common themes such as not following the time travel aspect, they wished the enemies to lovers was given more development (while acknowledging this is a novella), or perhaps the language was too poetic not leaving much to grab hold of. I think this book asks the reader to assess how it makes them feel versus spending too much time carving the sharp edges of the world we’re invited into.

I loved this story and still recommend giving this a read but feel conflicted and haven’t seen anyone else talk about this.