Twitter was kind of saved from doom recently by a guy loudly and proudly promoting his favorite new book, and encouraging others to do the same. I approve of this behavior. I was with Bigolas Dickolas (a Monty Python reference, I hope) in his enthusiasm for about the first half of This is How You Lose the Time War, but then it lost me. The problem for me is that there is not enough world and character building to hold interest and keep the story going once the antagonism shifts towards love. If it weren’t in the summary blurb that Red’s “Agency” is “a post-singularity technotopia” (whatever that means) and Blue’s “Garden” is “a single vast consciousness embedded in all organic matter”, I’d have no idea from reading the story what the two sides even were, and that would be nice to have to understand why the two are enemies at the start.
The epistolary premise also loses its spark once the letters turn from explaining how clever the writer was both in their defeat of the other and in their messaging mechanism to obsessive love letters. Once that happens, there’s more narrative than letter writing, and that voice is hardly different than the letter writing, which makes Red and Blue less interesting as individuals.
Granted, the Garden seems basically like the Borg if they were plants and not robotic, and the Agency feels like a highly dystopic Starfleet, but Blue’s not Seven of Nine and Red’s no Picard, and the analogy doesn’t really work, but it’s the closest that sort of makes some sense.
It’s too bad really; there was so much promise at the beginning, but it feels like the tension and the premise just kind of faded, and there isn’t enough left to finish the story well. The ending’s not half bad, but it could have been so much more interesting.
