Book Review: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War

Time-travel stories are generally fun to read as long as you don't demand perfect conceptual rigor, but sometimes you find one that fully commits to the logical weirdness that the genre requires and makes it work. This is one of those stories, essentially a lesbian Romeo and Juliet crossed with the hit 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Timecop that's both well-written and rewards rereading. Red and Blue are temporal assassins fighting a war back and forth in time. The actual causes of the war are obscure, but the technology-obsessed society that sent Red is implacably opposed to Blue's own nature-worshipping culture. The two start leaving taunting messages to each other after each timeline-shifting operation, one professional to another, which then gradually grow more fond as they begin to bond over their shared isolation, until their correspondence becomes so intimate that they decide to betray their respective factions and abscond together. There's a pleasing ouroborus structure lying behind their decisions, and the contrasting styles of the two protagonists' letters (El-Mohtar wrote Blue and Gladstone wrote Red) make their eventual infatuation all the better.