(no subject)

[skygiants]

I read This Is How You Lose The Time War, the lesbian time travel epistolary romance everyone is talking about this season!

... I read it very fast, because I missed that my library e-book hold had come in until the day before it was due, so this is not going to be the most in-depth review. But I enjoyed it! (By this point I had seen both a first wave of "lesbian time-travel enemies-to-lovers! genius! incredible!" reactions and then a second wave of "the worldbuilding is not very concrete and the voices both sound a little the same though" reactions so I was feeling a pleasant lack of pressure to either like or dislike it.) The novel is mostly epistolary, framed with little surrealist bits about how the warring time agents send each other letters, and indeed the epistolary voices do sound surprisingly similar given that one time agent appears to come from a high-tech future cyborg society and the other was grown in some variety of all-encompassing future solarpunk garden.

On the other hand, the language is very pretty, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are clearly having a time and a half diving deep into injokes and wordplay (I really enjoyed the letter delivered by seal that included a discourse on sealing letters! I'm an easy sell!), and the ending leans into the time travel element in a way that's satisfying emotionally and logistically, with that kind of perfect logic-puzzle click that only really good time travel stuff delivers. Generally all the parts where the protagonists directly and indirectly interact with other through the timeline were cool and specific and neat!

(Conversely the many, many sections that were like "she sent me a message through the medium of a subway mural daubed in twelve specific contrasting shades of cyan" were all lovely and numinous and gave me no logic-puzzle-click satisfaction at all. But I also suspect many of those sections included more clever wordplay and interesting implications that I would have enjoyed and picked up on if I had not been zooming through so fast.)

PS: while I'm on the topic of trendy lesbian time travel books, will whoever on my dwlist linked to the article from a month or so ago about all this year's other trendy lesbian time travel books please relink to that post, because I can't remember where it was and I would like to read them!

Comments

[seekingferret]

Ha, I went to a reading where they read the first third or so of the book, and their editor was there and she said that the whacked seal bit was the primary reason she bought the book. Which IMO is an excellent reason.

[skygiants]

IT REALLY IS, I love that whacked seal.

[hebethen]

This article?

[kate_nepveu]

which doesn't even include the other book I just finished, possibly because the time travel is . . . arguable.

ROT13: va rzcerff bs sberire, gur yrfovna cebgntbavfg trgf chyyrq vagb n sne shgher, ohg vg gheaf bhg gb or n ovg zber pbzcyvpngrq guna gvzr geniry rknpgyl

[skygiants]

That's the one, thank you!

[marginaliana]

Ooooooh, thank you for linking!

[reconditarmonia]

The Psychology of Time Travel is definitely very good!

[sheliak]

I'm just really happy that trendy lesbian time travel books are a thing.

[skygiants]

ME TOO. What a great trend, thank you for at least one thing, 2019.

[cinaed]

I enjoyed it too, though I'm sure some of the cleverness went over my head.

It's interesting. I've had other problems of similar epistolary voices, such as the Cecelia and Kate series, which always confuses me because it's two different authors writing different characters, and yet!

[skygiants]

I can actually tell Cecelia and Kate apart reasonably well, at least in the first book - I think the general surrealism of This Is How You Lose The Time War makes it harder, because both letters tend to get lost in flights of similar imagery and that distracts from concrete differences of style and characterization. Maybe?

[kore]

Yeah, I was really excited to read that book, and then....bounced off the style and worldbuilding and how the two people sounded the same. I keep meaning to go back to it and just give it another try, but I realized "hard fantasy" (that's sort of what it is? I think?) is just not my thing.

[skygiants]

Is that what we're calling it? I would think "hard fantasy" meant something that was very very logistically clear and scientific about how its magical worldbuilding worked (remember how in the nineties there were all those fantasy novels about scientists/academics/computer programmers who got transported to a fantasyland and got very serious about coding magic?) and science fantasy is the stuff like Star Wars that dresses up a whole bunch of Essentially Magic in vaguely science fictional set dressing, which I guess this ... kind of is. Very vaguely science fictional set dressing.

[kore]

Oh my, I don't think I ever read any of those. I think I saw "hard fantasy" in an article recently referring to books that read as if they have "hard" sf setups, but actually work more along fantasy worldbuilding lines. I can't remember now where it was, though.

[skygiants]

Oh man, I read several of them when I was young and ... most of them were extremely bad .... This is the one I'm thinking of in particular, I tried to reread it a year or two ago and gave up after a chapter or two.

[rymenhild]

I should like this book. However, I absolutely failed to care about the characters, so I stopped reading around the halfway point.

[skygiants]

Definitely a reasonable failure mode for books in which there are only two characters and both of their voices sound more or less the same!

[ase]

I DNF'd this during the week. Epistolary format is a hard sell for me. That and the way the wordplay got more development than the characters or the pacing got me to drop this. A+ concept, less than A execution. Might work better for me in audiobook? IDK.

[allchildren]

I knew of this book, but not the time traveling lesbian romance logline! SOLD, I think, probably, I mean, we'll see.

[izilen]

Becca, I would like your informed opinion on whether you think this would appeal to me, given the givens.