“This is how you lose the time war” by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar

🫂Only 151 pages long, 🪶“This is how you lose the time war”🪶 packs so much knowledge and weirdness into itself. I don't know if I've ever read something so confusing, tangled, and fragmented, yet carrying such clear messages and ideas🧩: those about war, friendship, betrayal, and most of all, about love. The forbidden, dangerous love; the one that only those who experience it are able to truly understand and feel; a love that is so strong, but threatens to destroy everything, being experienced in a world unsuitable for it…

💌In this captivating epistolary science fiction novel, we follow the blossoming and simultaneously fading love between Red 👩🏻‍🎤 and Blue 🧑🏻‍🎤 - two female beings (judging by the pronouns they identify with and the laconic physical characteristics) who emerge from one thread in time and space to enter the next. They exchange sensual letters, written entirely by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, respectively✍🏻. In them, they share even the tiniest things as if they were capable of outliving an entire world doomed to destruction. The magic of writing, sending, receiving and reading letters, presented in this way, is so beautiful💌… The two creatures belong to two enemy sides in a war, the reason for which is not clear. This war slowly but consistently and purposefully destroys the ground for love and any warm feelings♨️. As the translator of the book into Bulgarian, Victoria Valentinova, points out at the very beginning, this is not a love story with a happy ending, but one doomed to burn amidst all the ugliness of an apocalyptic world💣❤️‍🔥.

🫂The authors obviously have an extremely rich knowledge of the world, because very often the story interweaves puns that refer to books, poetry, films, music, etc. Terms are also used, mostly from the field of mathematics🌀🔢 (but also such related to history, culture, colonization, biology, etc.), whose explanations in the footnotes were very interesting for me to read🤩.

Many thanks to the publishing house “Poslepis” for the provided copy❤️! Leafing through these pages was a unique reading experience📖💙!