This Is How You Lose the Time War

The novel follows a more traditional Western story structure with a clear plot arc that follows the rising tension between Red and Blue’s factions, culminating in Blue’s death, which acts as a turning point for Red’s character. Despite this adherence to a more traditional plot arc, the authors bend aspects of the traditional plot arc to subvert expectations and convey the nonlinear and multiplicitous nature of the universe.

Since the war takes place across time as Red, Blue, and other agents work to braid and manipulate time to their sides’ advantage, the story necessarily moves through time and space in unconventional ways. Rather than seeing a linear progression, the novel follows Red’s and Blue’s journeys through time and across multiple timelines, resulting in sequences that resist linear flow. They are on spaceships and then around dinosaurs, and they complain of being bored with seeing the same events in history many times over. This shows how recursive time can be and the power of cause and effect. Time is only linear in how modern humans perceive it, and multidimensional beings like Red and Blue can see a bigger picture. They know how certain things that seem to matter so much are insignificant, yet they are also aware of the profound impacts a small action taken or not taken can have on the course of history. Garden and its soldiers also appear to create new realities, but these realities still follow the basic history of earth as readers know it. Throughout the narrative it is implied that these same major events recur over and over and both Garden and the Agency work to manipulate them to their advantage. Both Red and Blue confess that they hate Atlantis and all of its iterations, for example, suggesting that the mythical advanced civilization appears over and over as new strands are formed. This recursive nature also carries a nihilistic undertone since it demonstrates that there is no end to the struggle between the two warring sides, and the fruits of any one battle is ultimately inconsequential.

Though wars of machines, man, and beyond fill the pages of the novel, in the end, neither the Agency nor Garden wins. Blue and Red both win because they overcome the conflict, and their efforts in the time war are essentially pointless beyond bringing them together. The Agency and Garden seem to have unlimited knowledge and resources to fight wars, but everything they do and everyone they influence ultimately succumbs to time.

For example, when Red watches a volcano erupt she sees “[a] priestess and a priest [who] remain with their temple. They will be burned. They have lived their lives as sacrifices to—who again? Red has lost track. She feels bad about that. They lived their lives as sacrifices” (48). Red’s inability to remember why these two are dying underscores the futility of their deaths and the recursive nature of time. They lived to die for a cause that Red, someone aware of the timescape and how events play out, doesn’t remember, which signals that their existence may be meaningless, at least in this strand.

The authors play with time and multiverses as a mechanism for exploring nihilism and challenging linear progressions like the games of war by enacting a war that transcends traditional tactics with time and dimension travel and revolutionary technologies. Ultimately, the time war only highlights the futility of conflict and the relative meaninglessness of life.

The way Red and Blue interact with each other through letters emphasizes these anachronisms in meaningful ways. Through each other, they learn their power to impact each other. Even though Blue has been braiding time for almost as long as she’s been alive, she notes “[s]he’d never noticed her hands before—her own hand as a strand” (127). They see themselves and each other as part of existence outside of time, like when Red writes to Blue, “A stippling of sea skin indicates the whale beneath–or dots of star shape a bear light-years big–so I trace your life now, from these hints” (95). Time and dimension are just a part of nature, but it isn’t rigidly consecutive, and that fact is critical to the novel’s plot arc and Red’s and Blue’s character development.