This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar (English) Paperback Book

Description: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone * HUGO AWARD WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * NEBULA AND LOCUS AWARDS WINNER: BEST NOVELLA * "[An] exquisitely crafted tale...Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay...This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future. Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. Theres still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. Thats how war works, right? Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author, editor, and critic. Her short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron" won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and was a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Aurora, and Eugie Foster awards. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and The New York Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared on Tor.com and Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. She is presently pursuing a PhD at Carleton University and teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. She can be found online at @Tithenai. Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence, which Patrick Rothfuss called "stupefyingly good." The sixth book, Ruin of Angels, was released this September. Maxs interactive mobile game Choice of the Deathless was nominated for the XYZZY Award, and his critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and in anthologies such as XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. John Crowley described Max as "a true star of twenty first century fantasy." Max has sung in Carnegie Hall and was once thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Review "Seditious and seductive, lush and lustrous, allusive and elusive, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR is one of those rare stories where one struggles to decide whether to heap more praise upon its clever structure and prose or its brilliant ideas and characters." --Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories* "[An] exquisitely crafted tale.... Part epistolary romance, part mind-blowing science fiction adventure, this dazzling story unfolds bit by bit, revealing layers of meaning as it plays with cause and effect, wildly imaginative technologies, and increasingly intricate wordplay... This short novel warrants multiple readings to fully unlock its complexities."-- "Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW""This Is How You Lose the Time War is rich and strange, a romantic tour through all of time and the multiverse, and you shouldnt miss a moment."--Martha Wells, Hugo Award-winning author of The Murderbot DiariesTenderness, danger, daring, wit -- Time War has them all... In other words, these pages are strewn with myriad delights.--Nisi Shawl Review Quote " This Is How You Lose the Time War is rich and strange, a romantic tour through all of time and the multiverse, and you shouldnt miss a moment." Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 When Red wins, she stands alone. Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world. That was fun, she thinks, but the thought sours in the framing. It was clean, at least. Climb up times threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agencys arranged--the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible. Shes come to knot this strand of history and sear it until it melts. She holds a corpse that was once a man, her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She lets go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronze to depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red. After a mission comes a grand and final silence. Her weapons and armor fold into her like roses at dusk. Once flaps of pseudoskin settle and heal and the programmable matter of her clothing knits back together, Red looks, again, something like a woman. She paces the battlefield, seeking, making sure. She has won, yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasnt she? Both armies lie dead. Two great empires broke themselves here, each a reef to the others hull. That is what she came to do. From their ashes others will rise, more suited to her Agencys ends. And yet. There was another on the field--no groundling like the time-moored corpses mounded by her path, but a real player. Someone from the other side. Few of Reds fellow operatives would have sensed that opposing presence. Red knows only because Red is patient, solitary, careful. She studied for this engagement. She modeled it backward and forward in her mind. When ships were not where they were supposed to be, when escape pods that should have been fired did not, when certain fusillades came thirty seconds past their cue, she noticed. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. But why? Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Reds hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing. Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does, for Red. Her fellow agents do not feel the same, or they hide it better. It is not like Gardens players to meet Red on the same field at the same time. Shadows and sure things are more their style. But there is one who would. Red knows her, though they have never met. Each player has their signature. She recognizes patterns of audacity and risk. Red may be mistaken. She rarely is. Her enemy would relish such a magic trick: twisting to her own ends all Reds grand work of murder. But its not enough to suspect. Red must find proof. So she wanders the charnel field of victory and seeks the seeds of her defeat. A tremor passes through the soil--do not call it earth. The planet dies. Crickets chirp. Crickets survive, for now, among the crashed ships and broken bodies on this crumbling plain. Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses mouths would grow berries. It wont, and neither will they. On a span of blasted ground, she finds the letter. It does not belong. Here there should be bodies mounded between the wrecks of ships that once sailed the stars. Here there should be the death and dirt and blood of a successful op. There should be moons disintegrating overhead, ships aflame in orbit. There should not be a sheet of cream-colored paper, clean save a single line in a long, trailing hand: Burn before reading. Red likes to feel. It is a fetish. Now she feels fear. And eagerness. She was right. She searches shadows for her hunter, her prey. She hears infrasonic, ultrasound. She thirsts for contact, for a new, more worthy battle, but she is alone with the corpses and the splinters and the letter her enemy left. It is a trap, of course. Vines curl through eye sockets, twine past shattered portholes. Rust flakes fall like snow. Metal creaks, stressed, and shatters. It is a trap. Poison would be crude, but she smells none. Perhaps a noovirus in the message--to subvert her thoughts, to seed a trigger, or merely to taint Red with suspicion in her Commandants eyes. Perhaps if she reads this letter, she will be recorded, exposed, blackmailed for use as a double agent. The enemy is insidious. Even if this is but the opening gambit of a longer game, by reading it Red risks Commandants wrath if she is discovered, risks seeming a traitor be she never so loyal. The smart and cautious play would be to leave. But the letter is a gauntlet thrown, and Red has to know. She finds a lighter in a dead soldiers pocket. Flames catch in the depths of her eyes. Sparks rise, ashes fall, and letters form on the paper, in that same long, trailing hand. Reds mouth twists: a sneer, a mask, a hunters grin. The letter burns her fingers as the signature takes shape. She lets its cinders fall. Red leaves then, mission failed and accomplished at once, and climbs downthread toward home, to the braided future her Agency shapes and guards. No trace of her remains save cinders, ruins, and millions dead. The planet waits for its end. Vines live, yes, and crickets, though no ones left to see them but the skulls. Rain clouds threaten. Lightning blooms, and the battlefield goes monochrome. Thunder rolls. There will be rain tonight, to slick the glass that was the ground, if the planet lasts so long. The letters cinders die. The shadow of a broken gunship twists. Empty, it fills. A seeker emerges from that shadow, bearing other shadows with her. Wordless, the seeker regards the aftermath. She does not weep, that anyone can see. She paces through the wrecks, over the bodies, professional: She works a winding spiral, ensuring with long-practiced arts that no one has followed her through the silent paths she walked to reach this place. The ground shakes and shatters. She reaches what was once a letter. Kneeling, she stirs the ashes. A spark flies up, and she catches it in her hand. She removes a thin white slab from a pouch at her side and slips it under the ashes, spreads them thin against the white. Removes her glove, and slits her finger. Rainbow blood wells and falls and splatters into gray. She works her blood into the ash to make a dough, kneads that dough, rolls it flat. All around, decay proceeds. The battleships become mounds of moss. Great guns break. She applies jeweled lights and odd sounds. She wrinkles time. The world cracks through the middle. The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire ink in a viny hand at the top. This letter was meant to be read once, then destroyed. In the moments before the world comes apart, she reads it again. Details ISBN1534430997 Pages 224 Language English ISBN-10 1534430997 ISBN-13 9781534430990 Format Paperback DEWEY 813.6 Audience General UK Release Date 2020-03-17 Publisher S&s/Saga Press Imprint S&s/Saga Press Author Max Gladstone Year 2020 Publication Date 2020-03-17 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:126925107;

Price: 34.01 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2024-10-27T14:50:59.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD