Queer Letters

Disembodied liberation in This Is How You Lose The Time War

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019) is a love story told through letters. More, in many ways it’s a love story to letters, to words, and to writing. As a meta-novel, its passion for wit and language makes it impossibly clever—but also, perhaps, in its self-referential abstraction, somewhat glib.

This Is How You Win the Discourse

Glib or clever, though, the book has a propulsive plot which thumps along in practice even as it zig-zags eternally through time in theory. Red is a cyborg from a far future tech dystopia called the Agency; Blue is an organic quasi-mystical something from a utopia/dystopic different future ruled by a hive mind called the Garden. They’re both essentially superspy agents tasked with time traveling through the centuries to ensure their own particular future comes into being. They are enemies, sworn to thwart, and if necessary, kill each other.

Everyone’s respective missions start to go wrong, though, when Blue (whose letters are written by El-Mohtar) pens Red a note gloating over a minor victory. Red (whose letters are written by Gladstone) responds, and soon the epistles become flirtatious exercises in one-upmanship—and then they become more than flirtatious. Soon Red and Blue are more committed to each other than to the mission, making common cause as they try to hide their treachery, which is their love, from their respective cold, anti-individualistic futures.

In those futures, Red and Blue are both cogs, and the question the book asks, in part, is, “How do cogs, made to be cogs, turning from the beginning of time until the end, become people?”

The answer is, remarkably straightforward; cogs become people, the authors insist, through reading. Blue’s first letter calls Red to a self she didn’t know she had by “plant[ing] seeds or sores in my brain.” Red, in turn, farther back down the timeline, composes a poison made of every letter the two have written— “A small virus that…will taint juvenile Blue the most delicate shade of Red.” Red and Blue create each other from their own words, just as El-Mohtar and Gladstone, vying back and forth, create the novel and the characters, Red and Blue.

Self-creation is liberation is love is text: that’s an escalating equation common to capital-R Romantic writing. Tobin Siebers, in his Ethics of Criticism (1988) argues that the Romantics had a belief in the “marginality of literature”, by which he means that for the Romantics, literature was the province of the marginalized and of the social outcast. These outsiders can be victims in some circumstances, but for the Romantics they can also be imbued with spiritual and even physical power. Red and Blue, in casting off their destinies, as well as in their impressive, almost mystical physical prowess, are similar to the overman who (per Nietzsche, as Siebers explains) “regulates his desires and behavior not for the sake of others or under the compulsion of social contract but for his own satisfaction.”

Red and Blue are special individuals targeted by the fascist/Communist totalitarian state because they are readers and because they are writers; their marginalization is their discourse, which is their selves. El-Mohtar and Gladstone write these connections into the novel by having their characters name and rename each other using more and more complicated and witty puns. “Dearest Lapis,” Red writes; “Dear Strawberry,” Blue replies. “My Blueprint,” Red says; “My Apple Tree, My Brightness,” Blue volleys back, channeling the poet.

The pet names, nicknames and allusions are a means whereby Red and Blue build each other and twine round each other. Blue, the garden, becomes the blueprint for the cyborg, and the cyborg births the apple tree. Their descriptions call each other to a self, and in being selves they become targets. Their letters make them victims of the dull inevitabile totalitarianisms, and a danger to those totalitarianisms as well.

Queer Stories

Red and Blue both use she/her pronouns, and so their flirtation, and their eventual love, is coded as, and meant to be seen as, queer. They share a forbidden love, which recalls Romeo and Juliet (mentioned several times in the novel) but also evokes the history (and the present) of queer repression and the closet. Red and Blue are careful not even to think of each other lest their love be discovered.

Queer love, then, carries a lot of symbolic weight in the book. But it’s also oddly indistinct. That’s in large part because neither Red nor Blue exactly have bodies. They both can change shape and appearance, and both figure in the text as something like disembodied consciousnesses, taking one form here, another there, as the timestream flows hither and yon. Red can add modifications to appear male and add or subtract modules to fit into different societies. Blue can grow herself into a six-legged wolf or a robot in a shiny mask.

The fluidity and the abstraction turn gender into a kind of arbitrary fiction; “The more that Blue and Red appear in different forms,” Natalie Zutter writes at Den of Geek, “the less their gender actually matters to the story.” Red and Blue have no one body, and so gender presentation and gender conformity both become meaningless. Queer love is love between people of the same gender, but here it is also love that floats free of body and gender, sliding over not-tongues as a pure love of the word itself.

A queerness that exists only in words lines up with ideas of gender as performance or social construct; bodies, in a certain strand of queer theory, dissolve into discourse.

The primacy of words, though, does at some point leave you wondering whether the marginalization of reading is being used as a metaphor for queerness, or whether queerness is being appropriated as a metaphor for the supposed plight of the reader and writer. As in Fahrenheit 451, there’s a sense in which Time War presents readers and writers as the iconic victims of violence; words themselves, rather than what they say, or who says them, are the Romantic challenge to the status quo. The letter is you and transforms you, a conceit so universal in its abstraction that it becomes uncertain what the particularities of queer bodies, or queer love, have to do with it.

This is how you win with bodies

If that seems too verbose and insufficiently corporeal, it might help to look at another example. Maria Ying’s series Those Who Break Chains has, at least on an initial look, a lot of parallels with This is How You Lose the Time War. Ying’s books are set in an alternate timeline/near future. They’re written by two authors—Maria Ying is a pseudonym for the writers Devi Lacroix and Benjanun Sriduangkaew. And the main characters (and really just about all the characters) are lesbians.

There are differences too. Time War flirts with literary fiction; Those Who Break Chains is more solidly ensconced in genre. Ying’s books focus on a family of sorcerors, the Huas, based in Singapore and Hong Kong, who are renowned and feared for their dealings with demons. The novels read like action-packed spy fantasy thrillers with lots of intrigue and magic and romance.  True to that last genre, Those Who Break Chains includes a lot of sex scenes, and those sex scenes require, and revel in, bodies.

Bodies in Those Who Break Chains, come in a wide variety of shapes and forms. That means cis and trans, but it also means were-tigers, golems/homunculi, and demons with the ability to create orifices and protrubences at will, or even to split into multiple selves.

Again, in Time War, the characters change shape without much fuss or investment. In Ying’s work, though, the exuberant proliferation of female physical forms in all their interlocking possibilities is absolutely not casual. Rather, the series returns over and over to problems or delights of embodiment.

Book one starts with sorcerer Viveca Hua summoning a demon, Yves. Demons need to be bound to something physical in the human world, and Viveca binds Yves to herself (“This will take some getting used to,” Yves quips drily). The demon becomes solid, essentially, through love; queer desire forms the self, as in Time War, but this desire is about taking on fingers, tongues, and demon bits rather than about the changing colors of mental moods.

Along the same lines, Fahriye Budak, a dashing and incorruptible police inspector, finds her consciousness transported into a homunculi, after which her lover, Lussadh al-Kattan asks her if she would like to change her pronouns to reflect her new body (Time War never suggests that any shape shift could possibly make Red or Blue reconsider their gender identities.) Chun Hyang is a creature formed from the merging of two other entities, one of whom had a daughter named Vivian who struggles to accept the transformation. Another former police officer named Recadat has been possessed by an insect/monster/thing; it hollows her out and then leaves. She begs the Huas to kill her because she feels her desire and hunger is unclean. “She no longer believes herself part of her own kind, deserving of dignity and kind treatment.”

These negotiations of bodies and boundaries are all metaphors for various kinds of queer experience—of family disapproval, of dysphoria, of self-hatred, of coming to understand oneself as a new demon in a world that hasn’t set aside a body for you.

In creating these mirrors of queer identity, Ying inevitably suggests or recalls the fact of queer marginalization. But the books aren’t about that marginalization. Instead, the world of the novels is one in which queer marginalization, as queer marginalization, has largely been banished. The Hua family is feared and despised and envied because they’re powerful, not because of their gender or sexuality. The world of Those Who Break Chains is violent and deadly, but it isn’t homophobic—and even if it was, all those lesbian were-tigers and demons would dispose of the homophobes right quick.

Red and Blue fight for their individual right to love each other against totalizing oppressive state power. The Huas have ruthless enemies, but they are wealthy powers themselves, and engage in nefarious plots and counterplots on their own behalf, rather than for some Agency or Garden which hates them. The Those Who Break Chains novels embrace the genre default of empowerment, rather than the Romantic assumption of marginalization. No one would dare tell a Hua who to love. (Though mother Hua is admittedly somewhat put out by her daughter Oleysa’s relationship with that declassé were-tiger. Demons are fine though.)

Red, Blue, and Demon Blood

“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another,” El-Mohtar writes in the acknowledgements to Time War. It’s a dazzling little metaphor, designed to sweep you off those embodied feet.

If you read Those Who Break Chains, though, the formulation does seem to overreach a little at its end. Are all books trying to save the world? Are all books from any one person to any other? Or is the goal, sometimes, to reach out to specific communities, and talk about how they might live in the world with their bodies? Yves and Viveca and Fahriye (and Red and Blue too for that matter) are mostly interested in saving each other. If that means they have to save the world, so be it, but it’s not the main thing.

Stripping identities of bodies can create a false sense of universality. A generalized fight against depersonalization isn’t exactly an oxymoron, but it does risk effervescing into its own rhetoric. Books can inspire resistance, love and hope, and This is How You Lose the Time War does all that. Disconnected from bodies, though, queer liberation in the novel feels a little adrift.