Skip to main content

[Review Short] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This isn't space opera (as certain adulatory reviewers call it), it's space narcissism.

The two main characters, Red and Blue, are opposing superagents in a time war, traveling wherever and whenever they wish, manipulating and destroying people, cities, even civilizations, to further their side's agenda. They begin writing letters back and forth to each other as sort of a masturbatory exercise in mutual approval, then fall in love. 

It's Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence with a time travel plot wrapper.

Remember: the garden-variety narcissist is the star of his or her own movie: everyone else is an extra. And this book takes modern narcissism to new heights: While Red and Blue enjoy the drug of attention from each other, not just other people but entire civilizations are their extras. Worse, this reader found himself totally indifferent to the fates of these two characters.

Finally and worst of all, the authors seem indifferent to their own story and don't even bother to resolve their own plot. Perhaps it's just another extra too.

More Posts

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

A book about heeding the miraculous cognitive process we call intuition, "a brilliant internal guardian" that enables us to perceive things before they happen. This book give you a tremendous set of tools for assessing risks, making predictions, and understanding which things you should (and shouldn't!) be afraid of. This book is a wonderful navigational tool for modernity. I'll add that aside from being an insightful guy, author Gavin de Becker is quite an interesting guy. I recommend digging into any of the podcasts or long-form interviews he's done. See for example  this interview with Tucker Carlson , striking in part because Carlson (for once) hardly talks--he simply lets de Becker talk. [Again, please skip or skim these notes below, they are too long and life is short!] Notes:   Chapter 1: In the Presence of Danger 1) "Like every creature, you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stand...
Read more

A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young

It's a rare pleasure to find so many insights in such a short book. A modern reader can't help but notice the stark contrast between A Technique for Producing Ideas  and most modern books, which might have a few paragraphs' worth of insights, but yet always seem to be fluffed and padded out to at least 200-300 pages. The author gives away a formula for creativity and idea generation that is simple, but not easy. And as a result almost no one will follow it. In the author's own one-paragraph summary, his process is: * First, the gathering of raw materials--both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.  * Second, the working over of these materials in your mind.  * Third, the incubating stage, where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis.  * Fourth, the actual birth of the Idea--the 'Eureka! I have it!' stage. * And fifth, the final shaping and ...
Read more

Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

This book can be read as an intellectual rejection of modernity, and a turning toward prior eras for wisdom on how to live. Author Thomas Moore criticizes the modern era's gradual forgetting of its history, myth, religion and cultural heritage, and shows how this leads to a generalized shallowness and ignorance about what's going on inside our own bodies and minds.  Moore believes we moderns are losing contact with our souls, and he's right. There is very little in the modern era to teach us what to do when our souls suffer. [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] The author, an admirably eclectic thinker, takes the reader on an unusual journey, drawing on mythology, art, literature, on various Renaissance-era thinkers like Para...
Read more