Book Thoughts: This is How You Lose the Time War
I just finished listening to This is How You Lose the Time War.
It was a very different kind of sci-fi novel. Very abstract, poetic. Loose on detail and high on feelings, which is a stark contrast to many stories in the space which are so fixated on hard maths and time paradoxes.
It was honestly a beautiful short story. It plays off modern common knowledge of sci-fi, hand-waving the nanomachines and time-jumping into the background so we can focus on the two focal characters as they write letters to one another and develop a relationship.
As they move from rivals to friends to more, their letters become increasingly abstract -- the wingbeats of a bee, the shapes of the year-lines in a felled tree, the protein shapes of a core of apple. Admittedly, while these feats of steganography managed to imply technical and artistic feats of nature and technology that were wildly romantic, they occasionally broke immersion with how absurdly out-of-the-box they got.
I regret having listened to this one rather than reading it, I feel like the tactility of holding and reading their letters on paper, and treading and re-treading passages, would have elevated this beyond what the narrators could do.
All in all I found it a very pleasant and creative piece of sci-fi. I really enjoyed the intertwining of sci-fi and poetic writing, which is a combination I don't freqently see in my usual reading.