How to Lose the Time War falls into that category of time-travel stories which simply accept that the impossible has at some point become possible, without dwelling on the how. (In a way, these books say, how could a present-day author even hope to explain the mechanics? The sheer impossibility of taking a step back to a minute ago — undoing the deed, unsaying the said, undotting the i — surely such a thing could be accessible only to a humanity so far advanced beyond our own that we could never understand how it works, let alone comprehend how the world as we know it could continue to exist.) As early as its third paragraph — after a couple of brief, scene-setting opener sentences — the book shows what it will ask of us. The “she” here is known only as Red:

That was fun, she thinks, but the thought sours in the framing. It was clean, at least. Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agency’s arranged—the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible. She’s come to knot this strand of history and sear it until it melts.

So then the concept of time in this story seems simple: threads — strands — which Red can somehow “climb.” She goes up the thread to get to the past, and presumably down to head in the other, future-ward direction. Red herself serves someone or something called an “Agency.” And her mission has something to do with securing a moment in history to prevent further unraveling, to ensure that nothing will happen right here whose outcome will be a future in which the Agency and Red herself don’t exist…

So the general shape of things isn’t hard to make out. Few details so far — how does she “climb,” how does she “knot” a moment, and how “sear” it once knotted? But it’s so early in the book that we just relax, confident that the blurry outline suggested here will be etched in later.

Which, well, doesn’t really happen. For This Is How You Lose the Time War is one of those science-fiction works in which impossible (to our eyes) technology simply has come to be possible, in ways we’d never understand even if carefully explained. It’s told, in other words, from the point of view of inhabitants of such a future: people who’ve lived for so long with a form of technology that they themselves mostly don’t think of the “how” much at all. They just do it.

Consider: if the “now” which you and I actually inhabit were Victorian England, and we set out to tell of certain events from the point of view of a 21st-century writer/reader of English, realistically speaking it would need no explanations either. It might be useful — atmospherically, stylistically — to describe the click of a laptop’s keyboard, the spray of electrons on a screen, the soft herky-jerky rocking of a natural-gas-powered commuter bus, the absorption of the bus’s occupants in the small glowing objects in the palms of their hands. But if we tried to explain how it all worked, we’d never get to the story. And yet it would all make sense from the point of view of the 21st-century protagonist, even if not from that of its readers.

By the way, the notion of a “time war” didn’t originate with this book. If you’ve watched much of the Doctor Who television program, even back in its earliest form in the 1960s, you’ve many times encountered the term and what it must represent: both sides in the war can move around into the past and back to the future, and can use that ability to repeatedly wipe each other out and to undo one wiping-out only to have the undoing itself undone…

But really, This Is How You Lose the Time War is not a conventional time-travel story. It’s not a stereotypical war story, either. It is both of those things to some extent, but mostly it’s a love story. In short, Red develops a deep mutual fascination with, and ultimately love for, her chief antagonist in the war: an enemy agent named (yes) Blue.

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