This is how you squander the multiverse
A critical review of This is How You Lose the Time War.
I can pinpoint the precise moment when I lost faith that This is How You Lose the Time War — a Hugo-award winning novella about star-cross’d, time-traveling, queer super-soldiers from incompatible futures locked in an eternal war of espionage that rages across all of space-time — knew how to follow through on its intriguing premise.
Early in the story, in some unspecified future century, one of the soldiers, whose chosen name is Blue, enters a temple dedicated to “the great god Hack” and has the following encounter:
At the centre is a boxy screen. It lights up as Blue approaches.
“Hello, I’m Mackint—”
“Hush, Siri. I’m here for the riddles.”
I need to emphasize this: Time War a narrative that spans the entire history and future of earth and beyond, where humanity spreads throughout the universe to colonize the stars and spawns countless iterations of civilization and barbarity. Not only that, but the book gives itself permission (though not enough pages) to explore an infinite set of alternate timelines. It was an opportunity for authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone to cut fucking loose. They had a license to imagine any possible reality for humanity, no matter how out-there or implausible. It’s a multiverse story!
And yet, in this chapter, they settle for a reference to an Apple computer and a pun on “Hey Siri.”
I guess you could say I was underwhelmed.
Here’s a bit of context for anyone who hasn’t read Time War: The book follows Blue and Red, the other protagonist, as they attempt to preserve two different potential futures, known only as Garden and Agency. The story isn’t really about those future worlds or even really the war; it’s about Blue and Red’s relationship, which develops through an illicit exchange of letters. Time War is an epistolary romance novel woven into a science fiction yarn.
Still, even as they fall in love, the two soldiers continue to do their jobs. (They are professionals, the book reminds us.) Blue and Red are constantly reshaping, ending, knotting, tangling, burning or redirecting different possible timelines to benefit their own sides.
Their love story unfolds, in other words, within a fictional setting where the very idea of a stable past should be an alien concept. It’s a book about how narratives, including the narrative we call “history,” don’t have happen a certain way. (Blue observes, at one point, that she would’ve loved being a scholar who could “catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy.”)
The book’s central twist on time travel is that events in history — and time itself, really — have no inherent meaning. They are ephemera and easily changeable. What matters is Red and Blue’s shared subjectivity — the history of their encounters and the way their emotional, inner lives become interwoven. So when one of them alters something about the past, the expected ripple effects for that timeline are never explored in detail because it simply doesn’t matter how this or that event will play out. They are irrelevant.
Which is why the appearance of something so immediately recognizable to a twenty-first century reader, something as banal as Apple’s electronics, is a shock. The familiarity feels wrong.
This reference isn’t the only such moment, just one of the more blatant ones. The novel is crammed with other allusions that its readers should latch onto easily; Shakespeare, obviously, but also:
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
Dante
Scylla and Charybdis
Atlantis
the walls of Jericho
Socrates
Genghis Khan
Mary, Queen of Scots
Toronto, Ottawa and Ontario
Eiffel 65’s pop anthem “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”
the song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”
And so on.
This density of literary and historical reference is actually cited by other critics as one of the book’s strengths. Here’s how Jake Casella Brookins, writing in the Ancillary Review of Books, interprets the heavy presence of cultural allusions:
They’re important here not so much for how they color the text as for how they implicate the reader—Red reading Blue, Blue reading Red, and always the reader reading The Time War. The tone and intention of the references change along with the emotional arc: in early letters, Red and Blue are clearly showing off—demonstrating their cleverness, inducing groans with intricate puns and jokes—while gestures towards Demeter, Orpheus, and 1984 color the nearly-tragic resolution. The frequency and range of allusion—the way that the novel is constantly pointing up and out of itself—make it feel larger, more expansive. There’s a part of me that is always surprised it’s only novella-length.
Brookins wrote a thoughtful review, and it’s worth reading in full. But I disagree with the passage quoted above: The way these references “color the text” matters a lot. The incessant stream of callbacks to the reader’s own reality breaks the promise of an infinite, ever-changing set of historical possibilities. Despite a near-certainty that Red and Blue — super-beings unfathomably different from “time-moored” humans — would absorb a smorgasbord of strange cultural references, they choose to communicate in terms the reader would recognize without effort.
That’s not to say there is nothing new or unexpected in the story. Red teaches herself how to write letters by relying on Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide to Etiquette and Correspondence, which sounds like a Victorian-era text but, as far as I can tell, has never existed in our version of reality. There are a few tantalizing references to a place and time known as Abrogast-882, where Red and Blue, as enemies, first made eye contact. And there are other such inventions. But these are rare.
It makes a certain sort of sense. The book isn’t interested in “world-building” beyond the vaguest of gestures. Even the vastly different futures of Garden and Agency that Blue and Red are initially fighting to preserve are, to the reader, little more than sketchy outlines built of scattered images.
It’s part of the book’s commitment to demonstrating that narratives don’t have to be told in a certain way: Time War is shrugging off the strictures of convention and subverting the suffocating expectation that a sci-fi story needs to have a dense, intricately detailed version of reality with every starship and technology and alien and world named and quantified and visualized.
I respect the goal. But it contradicts the novella’s central conceit that history is fluid and undermines its celebration of radical contingency and possibility. As a result, Red and Blue aren’t really written as super-being from the far-future: They just feel like moderately well-read twenty-first century human beings with a few cybernetic implants.