I don’t have anything witty to say about this one - can you tell I’m running out of new backgrounds?
Author: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Publication: 2019
Genre: Science fiction
Again it’s been awhile! since I finished this one. I’m going to try to catch up on the backlog a bit. There have been some good ones lately, but this might be the best of the bunch. Time War deserves all of the praise that has been heaped upon it (including, most recently, a Hugo award).
In summary: two time-traveling agents of futuristic powers are locked in battle with each other. Each belong to their own kind of hive mind. Red is the agent of a hive-mind robot (AI?) entity. Blue is the agent of an edenic garden world. They travel through time and possibility, wrecking havoc on the strands of history that will lead to the other side’s future dominance.
In the aftermath of a battle, Blue leaves an encoded “letter” for Red and they begin a correspondence. Throughout the first 2/3 of the text letters fly back and forth between disparate locales in time and space. The format evokes Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the (derivative, imho) Sum by David Eagleman (and probably others) in its short, descriptive hops between settings. Unlike its predecessors, though, in Time War there is a love story brewing. Most of the short sections alternate between letters written by the two protagonists, and scenes in which they place the “letters” in various forms in their surroundings, while being chased by an unexplained figure known only as “the seeker”.
In my reading, at least, the twist became clear somewhat before it was actually put in to play, but it was still brilliant executed.
My only criticism, perhaps, is that the authors spend too much space hinting and describing rather than telling the reader what the hell is going on, necessitating in a very closing (re-) reading of certain passages. Or maybe I’m just slow. On the whole, though, Time War is a delight, and one that I won’t hesitate to revisit.