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If you're in the mood for some beautiful literature wearing the trappings of science fiction, may I direct your attention to Amal El-Mohtar's book This Is How You Lose The Time War.
On the surface of it, this is a book about time travel. But at its core it isn't. It's a book about love as a motivating, driving force that can push past the impossible. It's a book about language as a clever, ever-winding snake that slithers from meaning to meaning, making them more real as it passes. And it's a book about how words don't just lend meaning to the concepts for which they're synecdotes but retain some of that weight of meaning through association.
It's a book about two bitter enemies, Red and Blue, on different sides of a fierce war in the cosmos with the stakes being the shape of the future to come. And it's a book about two people coming to love one another by the passing imprint the other leaves on their lives.
It's a glorious tale and the complexities of time travel are shunted to the side because they're not needed for this story. But the narration and the prose... now those weave and wind and become very tangled in metaphor in small, subtle, joy-filled ways that you might miss if you're not keeping an eye out for hidden beauty while you read.
On the surface of it, this is a book about time travel. But at its core it isn't. It's a book about love as a motivating, driving force that can push past the impossible. It's a book about language as a clever, ever-winding snake that slithers from meaning to meaning, making them more real as it passes. And it's a book about how words don't just lend meaning to the concepts for which they're synecdotes but retain some of that weight of meaning through association.
It's a book about two bitter enemies, Red and Blue, on different sides of a fierce war in the cosmos with the stakes being the shape of the future to come. And it's a book about two people coming to love one another by the passing imprint the other leaves on their lives.
It's a glorious tale and the complexities of time travel are shunted to the side because they're not needed for this story. But the narration and the prose... now those weave and wind and become very tangled in metaphor in small, subtle, joy-filled ways that you might miss if you're not keeping an eye out for hidden beauty while you read.
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