Here are the bare bones: Two female time-traveling agents, Red and Blue, from the opposing sides of a war raging across time and space. They are, each of them, the very best at what they do, traveling up and down a vast complexity of multiple timelines, altering events both mind-bogglingly large and infinitesimally small. They commit the wholesale slaughter of entire armies, then change the path of a single wandering monk. Both are playing an unfathomably long game that stretches across thousands of years.

If you read the above description, you might mistake this novella for rather old-fashioned, hard science fiction, something that could have been written by Heinlein, or maybe Bester.

Nope. This is a different and much wilder animal.

See, as they work the timelines, braiding and unbraiding events, the agents become aware of each other. They begin to leave notes, letters, for each other to find, at first taunting, then showing a certain grudging respect for each other’s skill, and finally, haltingly, love. This Is How You Lose the Time War becomes, at least in part, an epistolary novella, and the most unusual, ravishing love story I’ve ever read.

Take, for instance, those letters I mentioned. Yes, some are written by quill, in longhand. But some take forms by turn whimsical and scarifying—in birds, in seeds, in lava flows, in words that can be ingested into the body.

What sets this novella apart, and one of the reasons I think it was recently nominated for a Hugo, is the language. El-Mohtar and Gladstone are working in rarified air here. The words leap and dance off the page, incandescent, intoxicating, alive. There were moments here where I was a little adrift, not exactly sure what I was reading, and I never gave a damn. I just went with the flow of the story, let it wash over me, and came out the other side.

Whatever I say, I can’t possibly do This Is How You Lose the Time War justice. Just read it, fall in love with Red and Blue, and get lost in the best possible way.