This Is How You Lose the Time War
This Is How You Lose the Time War
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Amal El-Mohtar on This Is How You Lose the Time War
In them own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
Letters first, then a bookBefore a single word of the novella existed, El-Mohtar and Gladstone had spent roughly a year exchanging handwritten letters. The collaboration grew out of that friendship, and out of reading each other’s work, rather than from any prior intention to co-write a book.
We were inspired, first and foremost, by how much we liked each other and our respective writing! First we read each other’s work, then we became friends, then we started writing each other letters, then we became better friends, then we said we should really collaborate on something together, and decided that a novella was roughly the right length for us to experiment with pairing our different voices and attempting to blend them into weird harmonies.
That letter-writing practice, which predated the book itself, surfaced the specific question El-Mohtar wanted the novella to sit inside. The act of sending a letter, they realized, is itself a form of time travel: the person writing is already gone by the time the reader arrives.
That sense of folding up a singular moment of yourself and sending it into the future to be read by a person who doesn’t yet exist, and who’ll be reading a letter from a person who no longer exists, but was preserved in the amber of ink on paper.
El-Mohtar grew up in a Francophone high school in Ottawa where their particular enthusiasms — built from English-language books and cartoons — went largely unshared. Connection arrived only through the early internet, across a significant distance from anyone who matched those obsessions. That experience of isolation-made-exceptional sits at the center of what the book is actually about.
There’s so much of this book that comes out of confronting loneliness, of recognising the things you have done to make yourself exceptional and superlative have also made you very alone, and trying to find a community with someone who’s in a similar place, even if that place is also kind of across enemy lines.
The enemy-lines detail is not decoration. El-Mohtar’s two agents, Red and Blue, are combatants in a war over the shape of history, and the logic of that war is what makes their correspondence both necessary and forbidden.
By 2019, El-Mohtar had noticed a cluster of books appearing about time-traveling women who loved women, and they were glad to be counted among them. The queer dimension of the book was deliberate, and rooted in what they had not found as a reader when they were younger.
I’m so thrilled about this, to be part of this kind of utterly unlooked for cohort. They’re all such different books... It all makes me really happy, especially when I think back on the paucity of queer affection I saw depicted in the books I grew up with.
How they wrote it
Swap the laptop, read, exclaimThe first substantial draft happened at a writing retreat, in a gazebo, with no internet connection. Rather than research, El-Mohtar and Gladstone worked from what each of them already carried: El-Mohtar brought plant names, British Romantic poetry, and niche Canadian bands from the nineties; Gladstone brought math, Chinese history, and a deeper SF catalogue.
The book is built primarily out of no research, but instead what we both brought to the literal table between us in a literal gazebo as we wrote things!
The relay structure they used meant neither author ever knew what the other had written until the laptop landed in front of them. El-Mohtar wrote every line Blue sends; Gladstone wrote every line Red sends. Within that, the situation surrounding each letter was always written by the author who had not written the letter itself.
One of us would write the letter, and the other would write the situation in which the letter was received. Then we’d swap laptops, read what we’d written, exclaim in delight, and move on to the next part.
The two authors write at very different speeds. Gladstone writes roughly four times as fast as El-Mohtar, so the early exchanges involved him finishing and waiting. El-Mohtar described what happened to that gap over the course of the book, and the synchronization itself became a kind of story.
I feel like what we kind of did was give each other room to bring all of our toys out of our respective closets and, like, pile them onto the ground between us, and make the dinosaur talk to the robot.
The book’s war, with its many-worlds mechanics and its competing factions called the Agency and Commandant, is kept almost entirely offscreen. That was a choice made in advance and held to throughout revision. El-Mohtar used the same image in multiple interviews to explain what the war is actually doing in the book.
Blue is someone who feels this constant gnawing, insatiable hunger that nothing in her world seems able to sate… until she starts being surprised by Red, this agent on the other side, who makes things hard for her.
Withholding the war’s mechanics meant every scene set inside it functions as atmosphere rather than explanation. The reader experiences what Blue and Red experience: flickers of a larger conflict that never quite resolves into a map.
The personal thread
Grief at what they were doingEl-Mohtar was asked, on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, to name a favorite moment in the novella. The answer they gave was not a passage or a plot turn. It was a memory of the room where they wrote it, and what it cost both of them to keep going.
My favourite bit of this novella—besides remembering its creation, the moments where our eyes met in mingled shock and grief at what we were doing to these characters, and how well we were doing it—is the point of no return.
The competition between the two authors was not adversarial, but it was real, and El-Mohtar credited it with driving quality in both directions. Gladstone described the same dynamic from his side, and his phrasing makes clear the pressure was mutual.
Amal would write a line that totally slayed me, just laid me out on the mat, and I’d think, shit, I have to give her something back that’s at least that good. You get that sense of two rabbits racing one another.
On what the book is wrestling with
The only private space leftThe letters in the novella are not sent by post. They are hidden in tree rings, dissolved into tea, folded into the bones of birds. El-Mohtar, speaking with BSFA Vector, connected that method of correspondence directly to a contemporary fact about surveillance, and to what the book is actually arguing about bodies and privacy.
Both Red and Blue are from places that assume a total omniscience of your actions basically. To keep their correspondence private, they both kind of have recourse to the very physical nature of their bodies.
El-Mohtar described the novella’s epistolary form, in which two agents on opposite sides of a war write to each other across time, as a way of making the stakes of correspondence literal and physical. The vulnerability is not metaphorical.
That sense of folding up a singular moment of yourself and sending it into the future to be read by a person who doesn’t yet exist, and who’ll be reading a letter from a person who no longer exists, but was preserved in the amber of ink on paper.
What they want us to sit with
An enemy who makes things hard for youEl-Mohtar returned, in nearly every interview, to the claim that the Time War is backdrop. The actual subject is correspondence, and what it demands of the person writing. They named the specific risk at the center of every letter Blue sends.
Blue is someone who feels this constant gnawing, insatiable hunger that nothing in her world seems able to sate… until she starts being surprised by Red, this agent on the other side, who makes things hard for her.
That phrase, ‘your invention of a person,’ is the book’s thesis in miniature. Every letter is written to a correspondent who is, partly, a fiction the writer has constructed. The novella asks whether love that begins in that gap can survive the actual person on the other side.
El-Mohtar’s earliest origin story for the book points to the loneliness of excelling at something no one around you shares. By the end of the novella, that loneliness has become the argument: the right correspondent, even an enemy, is what breaks the loop.
There’s so much of this book that comes out of confronting loneliness, of recognising the things you have done to make yourself exceptional and superlative have also made you very alone, and trying to find a community with someone who’s in a similar place, even if that place is also kind of across enemy lines.