Time Wars, Consumption and The Romance of Tangibility
There’s nothing more romantic than professing your love to your enemy of thousands of years from the opposite faction of a war that’s fought around the fabric of time itself. I read Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War, trust me.
This whirlwind sci-fi romance novella absolutely aches with the love contained within it; love that the characters carry for the other in their letters, and a love that transcends the boundaries of the temporal (quite literally). Its cheeky back-and-forth develops into a breathless romance that — I pose — is solidified by the interplay between the tangible and intangible, tugging on a pervasive longing that threads across the book. If you haven’t heard of or read it — I hope this article convinces you to give it a shot. It contains spoilers but I believe the beauty of this book is its journey so don’t let that deter you! Or come back to this later. I’m flexible but I also have to pay my bills (I’m not being paid).
We can’t explore Romance in Time War without first covering queer desire. In his dissertation ‘Incandescently Queer: Reading Desire in Culture’, Joel Christian Adams suggests that reading a text as queer creates a different analytical framework that subtly de-centres the heteronormative hegemony in favour of focusing on truly queer desire and all of its idiosyncrasies. This suggests that by virtue of its existence, queer fiction encourages alternative thinking and a breakdown of normative conventions.
While Time War is explicitly sapphic, the same lens of reading applies. Longing in the novella — a forbidden longing between women on different sides of the enemy line — takes on another dimension, even if their world doesn’t operate under the same heteronormative rules as ours. Their romance, as one that has to be hidden from the eyes of their Agencies, has real world queer undertones, metaphorically grounding their very science-fiction-specific issues in a way often (and unfortunately) relatable to the queer experience. It very much matters that this is a sapphic romance even while it’s understated in the text — there’s a subtle and nearly subconscious edge to their relationship.
The sapphic nature of the novella also lends to its themes of consumption. This is best seen in the final letter Red sends Blue, taking the form of destructive berries:
“[Blue] was always going to eat it down to the root. There are as many berries as they have exchanged letters. She eats one slowly, her eyes closed, crushing some against her hard palette, others beneath her teeth, rolling their sweetness along her tongue. They have bitter, varied aftertastes, and the numbing properties of clove–frustrating when the thorns begin to tear into her cheeks and throat. She wants to feel everything.” (This is How You Lose The Time War, p.161)
The way she savours them is reflected in the structure of the prose, the breaks provided by the commas mirroring a compartmentalisation of senses. ‘Always’ implies an inevitability, especially stark in her position outside of time, drawing a line of connection between her and Red even in her own self-destruction. There’s an overwhelming urge to touch, and feel, and consume — a desperate want to devour that juxtaposes her gentle, slow eating (the double entendre is absolutely intentional). Tensions pull between love and destruction and the lines blur. Love becomes consumption, to have and to hold in any physical form.
Consumption is a popular metaphorical (and often literal) vehicle for exploring love, seen in the narrative obsession of tying cannibalism with love. This is especially seen in queer or homoerotic (cough, Hannibal) media. It’s the overflowing of emotion, the need to become one with the person you’re in love with, taken to the absolute extreme.
It adopts another layer in the case of Red and Blue who literally take on different forms depending on their mission. The shifting of physical form creates an adrenaline-filled instability that mirrors the beginning stages of their relationship as they test the waters with each other. Their jobs make it so that they’re running up and down Threads of time, slipping in and out of tangibility. Their longing to be with each other physically, firmly, and for eternity (“in every place I’ve ever loved” (p.149)) carries a metaphysical weight, constantly emphasised by the tactile, descriptive language in their letters: “I feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon” (p.102). There’s a recognition of the inner-selves, despite their shifting and as the relationship matures, tangibility becomes not only desired, but necessary.
They communicate in the book through letters, always a few moments away from physically occupying the same place. The novel plays with space in a way that teases presence and leaves absence with longing, their desire to connect left only in the physical letters they leave behind, embedded somewhere in the Thread.
In one instance, Red leaves a letter in the very rings of a tree and Blue “feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years” (p.34). There is an obsession with the tactile forms of the letters, juxtaposing the abstract notion of words. Letters are forms of direct communication and the (ironically) complicated and indirect methods of passing them lends to another layer of tension, especially when words carry such intent. The abstract form of words becomes the thing that cuts deeper than anything physically graspable as their writing shifts from a snarky back-and-forth to a vulnerable, unravelling of the self. They become embedded in each other in the very words they write: “The twist of you in me. The writhe. You’re a whip uncoiling in my veins, and I write between the reading and the snap.” (p.171).
Consumption is also a topic of conversation between the characters. Red, although not needing to eat, tells Blue earlier on in their correspondence that she enjoys it: “I revel in it, as one revels in pursuits one does not need” (p.44). Blue states in her response, “Absent from your mention of food… was any mention of hunger… Sometimes I think [hunger’s] what I have instead of friends.” (pp.53–54), which prefigures the obsessive devotion of her love. The absence of hungering for food further implies an absence of urgency that juxtaposes’ Blue. Following her, Red develops the same kind of burning, palpable hunger; a need for the other that goes beyond frivolous enjoyment, underscoring the mutuality of their love.
The focus on the interplay of the characters is further driven by the structure of the novella as it functions like a game of hide and seek. The swapping of point of view between Red and Blue creates this rhythmic give-and-take that accentuates a sense of equality and reciprocity. It’s a trope as old as time — two sides of the same coin and all that — but it’s especially poignant in the pacing of the novel. The reciprocity urges the pace forward, the readers rushing to get the next letter, to read a response, just as the characters do. There is a temporal dissonance as the characters sometimes wait thousands of years for the letters whilst readers may simply turn the page. This effect heightens the stakes of the romance, elevating it and creating the aforementioned breathless quality. The tangibility of the letters — held in their hands, devoured in the traces of the soil, and carved into the guts of a seal — become that much more precious. It’s an exhalation that comes every other chapter.
I’m simply in love with this book. How it portrays love in all its beauty and destructiveness, how it conveys the feeling of wanting and yearning and finding a person who gets you. How it’s obsessed with language and uses it to its full potential.
It’s rebellious. It’s messy and raw and romantic and tangible, and so incredibly human.
Side note:
Speaking of consumption and humanity, I also want to direct attention to the genocide of Palestinians happening in Gaza. Care for Gaza is an on-the-ground charity organisation delivering food, supplies, hygiene products, and other essentials to people in Gaza and I urge you to make a donation if you are able. Amal-El Mohtar (one of the authors of This is How You Lose the Time War) is excellent to follow on Twitter for resources as well and has been actively posting about the genocide. Her newsletter is an important and heart-wrenching read. Take care, friends.
