This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019) 209 pages

I listened to the audiobook on Libby narrated by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller. Amal answers a reader's question on Goodreads about how the two authors divided the writing with "In brief, Max wrote all of Red and I wrote all of Blue." I struggled to follow the story and understand what was really happening in the early chapters of the book. It is a very abstract book with lots of poetic language and mind-bending multi-verse time jumps. The two main characters named Red and Blue are female time agents from two warring factions. If you are a fan of espionage stories, I wouldn't recommend this because the spy work of these two time agents is left pretty vague, or, at least, it is difficult to follow the thread of the consequences of their actions forward and backward through time. There are letters that Blue and Red send to each other in this short book, which start as taunts between competitors and turn into proclamations of love. Red's world includes many more references to human civilizations throughout history and has a sci-fi bent. Blue's world has many references to plants and animals and has a fantasy angle. Ultimately, I think this is really talking about the competition between humanity and nature through the millennia, and a star-crossed couple representing these two things begins to see value in each other.

 

Not Your Sidekick

 Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee, 283 pages.

Generations ago a massive solar flare wiped caused a series of nuclear meltdowns and other disasters that led to a radical restructuring of the entire world. It also awakened a latent gene to grant some people superpowers. Although both of her parents are superheroes (and superpowers are genetic) Jess hasn't shown any signs of inheriting any powers, leaving her feeling aimless and insufficient. Which is why when it turns out the perfect internship she's been offered is actually for local supervillain (and her parents' nemesis) Master Mischief she decides to take it anyway. But soon Jess finds out that there's more going on beyond the black and white world of heroes and villains.

I liked this book, although it read as a little more juvenile than I was expecting. I thought Jess's relationship with her secret crush and fellow intern Abby was really cute, and the world building has me intrigued, even if it's not anything earth shattering.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

 A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, 160 pages.

(Opening Note: I love this cover)

This novella follows Sibling Dex, a devotee of the goddess of small comforts and tea monk who goes from village to village giving a listening ear, a place to rest, and a specially brewed cup of tea to anyone who needs it. However, Dex is feeling trapped and unhappy with their life, even as they believe they are doing good and worthwhile work. The same feeling that drove them from being a garden monk in the city to a tea monk in the first place.

On a whim they decide to go off the map into part of the 50% of the planet that is nature reserve, hoping to find crickets. What they find instead is Mosscap, a wild-built robot who was sent to be the first contact between robots and humans in centuries. They have been sent to check in on the world they left behind so long ago and ask the new question "what do people need?" 

The rest of the novella essentially sets out to explore that question. Strangely, this book and the last book I reviewed (Project Hail Mary, here) pretty much reversed my expectation of them. I expected Project Hail Mary to be interesting mostly for its world building and found instead that it was driven by emotionally rich explorations of personhood and interspecies contact. A Psalm for the Wild-Built which (with the presence of a tea monk as a concept) I expected to be carried by emotionally rich explorations of personhood and interspecies contact was instead primarily carried by the really phenomenal Solarpunk world building. The setting Chambers builds is extremely beautiful in a very hopeful way. It provides a really interesting meditation on the ways that people could live, if we all chose to, in a thousand little details. Definitely an interesting little book. If you want to here more about it, see Kara's post here.