El Mohtar, Amal and Gladstone, Max - This Is How You Lose the Time War

Rating: 3/5 Worth reading
Pages: 254

I’ve enjoyed Max Gladstone’s books, but the title and cover of this one put me off for a long time.

Now I’ve read it, and I suppose it was worth reading, but only barely. For me, anyway.

I’ll give it that the writing of the letters between the two protagonists is nearly poetry, but this is a time travel story with a plot that makes little to no sense. I don’t think the authors actually intended to write a perfectly logical time travel story, but it still annoys me too much to really enjoy the story.

This time travel story has the same fatal flaw I’ve seen in many of them: the premise that people can change the future by changing their past.

When we’re not thinking about time travel stories, or quantum physics, we generally view time as a single sequence of events. Causes are followed by effects, which cause later effects, and so on.

If a time travel story takes that view of time as a single sequence of events, it follows that changing any event in that sequence will cause changes later in the sequence.[1] That’s the view taken in Robert Heinlein’s classic time travel story All You Zombies.

More commonly these days, time travel stories assume numerous different sequences of events. If you try to change a past event, you just create a new sequence, branched from the first one, in which that event happened differently and whatever followed from that, but the original sequence is still present. So you can’t change your own present, but you can create an additional, different present. The TV series Rick and Morty plays with this all the time.

This Is How You Lose The Time War tries to have it both ways. There are multiple “strands” of time, but you can change an event in a strand and cause changes farther along the strand. It’s never really explained how the multiple strands are created, though I think at least one someone talks about merging strands, which is a whole other level of unbelievable.

So, I can see why many people like this book, but it’s not my cup of tea.

1. Then the question comes up whether a time traveler can make any change that would prevent them traveling back in time to make that change, such as killing their grandparent before their parent was conceived. I’d say no, since if there’s only a single sequence of events, then it cannot be a sequence of events in which mutually contradictory events exist.